How To Write A Research Paper Summary

This handout will help you distinguish between summary and analysis and avoid inappropriate summary in your academic writing. But it’s important that your keep your assignment and your audience in mind as you write.If your assignment requires an argument with a thesis statement and supporting evidence—as many academic writing assignments do—then you should limit the amount of summary in your paper.

If you answer yes to the questions below, though, it is a sign that your paper may have more analysis (which is usually a good thing): is the story of a mysterious millionaire, Jay Gatsby, who lives alone on an island in New York. Scott Fitzgerald wrote the book, but the narrator is Nick Carraway.If you’re stalled by a difficult writing prompt, summarizing the plot of The Great Gatsby may be more appealing than staring at the computer for three hours and wondering what to say about F. After all, the plot is usually the easiest part of a work to understand.Something similar can happen even when what you are writing about has no plot: if you don’t really understand an author’s argument, it might seem easiest to just repeat what he or she said.Once you figure out what you know about a subject, it’s easier to decide what you want to argue.You may also want to try some other pre-writing activities that can help you develop your own analysis.This version of the paragraph mentions the book’s title, author, setting, and narrator so that the reader is reminded of the text.And that sounds a lot like summary—but the paragraph quickly moves on to the writer’s own main topic: the setting and its relationship to the main themes of the book.Nick is Gatsby’s neighbor, and he chronicles the story of Gatsby and his circle of friends, beginning with his introduction to the strange man and ending with Gatsby’s tragic death.In the story, Nick describes his environment through various colors, including green, white, and grey.Knowing how to summarize something you have read, seen, or heard is a valuable skill, one you have probably used in many writing assignments.It is important, though, to recognize when you must go beyond describing, explaining, and restating texts and offer a more complex analysis.