Argumentative essays are a common type of academic writing. These essays require students to present their arguments on a particular topic, supported by evidence and reasoning. While writing an argumentative essay can be challenging, summarizing one can be equally difficult.
This is because it will require students to identify the main points of the essay and condense them into a brief and coherent summary.
This article will provide students with a step-by-step guide on how to summarize an argumentative essay effectively. By following these steps, students will be able to summarize an argumentative essay quickly and accurately.
But before going into the detail, let us provide a quick yet effective overview of argumentative essays.
What is an Argumentative Essay?
As we already said in the introduction, an argumentative essay is a type of academic essay that is used to convince the reader of a particular point of view.
This type of essay includes making use of a clear thesis statement, fact-based evidence, and unquestionable logic to prove the arguments that are made in it. And finally, a conclusion that summarizes the key evidence while restating the thesis.
Now that you have good a quick overview of argumentative essays. It’s time to move on to our main topic.
How to Summarize an Argumentative Essay – Steps for Students
1. Read the essay carefully
To summarize an argumentative essay, students need to first carefully read it. Doing this will help them to understand what the essay is about and also what message the author is trying is convey.
Properly following this step will also assist them to grasp the main points and summarize the essay effectively.
Note: In this step, you just need to skim the information instead of spending time and effort on understanding arguments, reasons, or evidence.
Now most of the will be thinking about what strategies they should adopt in order to efficiently perform the reading process. Don’t worry, we have got you all covered. Below we have listed some useful strategies that can be helpful for students in the reading process.
- Read the entire essay multiple times
- Take notes of things that you think you may forget during the summarization process
- Pay attention to the o essay’s structure (how the author has explained things)
By following these strategies, there is a strong chance that students will get a quick overview of the essay material.
2. Understand the thesis statement
After reading the essay material carefully, you then start the understanding process. You should first understand the thesis statement. A thesis statement refers to the main arguments that are made in the essay.
A thesis statement is usually found in the introduction of the essay and provides a roadmap to the readers for the rest of the article.
By understanding the thesis statement of the argumentative essay, you will get a proper idea about the main intent of the essay. You can then use that idea to summarize the essay effectively.
One useful tip for you to quickly and efficiently understand the thesis statement is to look for specific phrases in the introduction of the essay. These phrases can be “In this essay” or “I will argue”
3. Identify the evidence and facts
From this step, you will need to spend full attention and focus. A little can from now on can ruin all the effort spent on the previous two steps. In this step, you will need to identify all the main evidence and facts that are discussed in the essay.
Evidence and facts are considered the backbone of the arguments made in argumentative essays. Identifying the evidence will allow you to understand the author’s perspective or message. On the other hand, facts will help in coming up with solid proof.
You can identify evidence and facts by looking for the topic sentences in each paragraph of the essay.
Note: It would be if you note them down on a personal notepad or any other thing. So that, you do not miss even a single while during the summarization process.
4. Start summarizing the essay
In this step, you will need to utilize both pieces of evidence and facts that you have gathered in the previous step to write an accurate and coherent summary. Summary refers to providing a concise overview of the long-form text.
During the summarization process, you will need to use the same words and phrases that are mentioned in the essay. Doing this will make your summarized text look credible. On the other hand, if you summarize it using your own words, then there are chances that may go out of context.
However, some students can face trouble using the same terms, especially if they are summarizing an argumentative essay written on a complex topic.
If the same is the case with you, then don’t worry, there is a solution to this. You can take help from an online text summarizer. A summarizer works by summarizing large pieces of content into short ones by only using the main points or sentences.
So, no matter if summarizing the essay in your own or take help from an online summarizing tool, it is essential to summarize the essay using the main points and ideas.
5. Proofread and edit
At last, you then proofread the summarized essay in order to make sure it is accurate and delivers the same perspective as the original source. And if you found anything irrelevant remove or edit it.
While proofreading, you also need to ensure the summarized essay is free from grammatical mistakes/errors. Not just this, you also need to ensure the references you have used are accurate.
Conclusion
For students, summarizing argumentative essays is a challenging task. This is because it involves understanding evidence and proof and then writing a short version of it. In this article, we have provided a step-by-step procedure that will help students effectively summarize argumentative essays.