SUMMARISING and PARAPHRASING information are important skills which will help you in making notes from other sources being able to summarise the relevant points in a document or article is also useful in the workplace - busy managers may not have time to deal with more than a couple of points from you at any one time SUMMARISING means briefly giving the main points of something. we see examples of this all around us every day - the News Summary is much shorter than the main news bulletin, and only gives the basic facts conventionally, summarising a piece of text means cutting it to about one third of its original length, and using your own words - paraphrasing - where possible PARAPHRASING means expressing the meaning of something in other words if you can paraphrase a piece of text it probably means you've understood it, since you are accurately conveying its meaning in your own words

If you find it difficult to cut large chunks of information down to size, these suggestions might help:

	photocopy what you're reading and number the main points in each paragraph
	then jot down the key words from these points to build up your summary
	write a short sentence to convey the meaning of each of your numbered points
	cut out all the 'describing' words from the original to trim down your points to the bare essentials
	cut out any 'recapping' by the author
	if you need inspiration in paraphrasing, keep a Thesaurus handy - or try looking for alternative suggestions in the Thesaurus in your word-processing package
	if the summary is for your own use only, consider breaking all the text down into bullet points or even a diagram showing how one point relates to another.

You can try our Summarising Exercise to see if these tactics help.