Help With Chapter Summaries?

Cut out unnecessary details and dialogue

I think the main trick is in telling yourself what the chapter said, using your own words, take some notes on what you are thinking, and then just clean up the prose. The object is to open a little window for your teacher on your ability to comprehend what you have just read. You can do that. Use a natural voice, and just share your thinking.

As you read each chapter, think about who the main characters are. Also, pay attention to the main plot point or action that takes place that chapter. Sometimes there are many characters and many actions to keep track of, so it would be helpful to keep a notebook nearby and write down what seems important.

It’s difficult only at first; as you get used to it, it will come easier to you. As with most things, proficiency comes with practice.

Imagine that you’ve got a friend who’s in some technological backwater where he can only read email, and he wants to hear all about these books, and insists that after you finish each chapter, you send him a short summary. What do you tell him about each chapter?

(This technique works incredibly well for writing at all levels—I never actually motivated myself to write my masters’ thesis directly, but instead wrote a lot of emails to my friends about what the next chapter was going to be—emails that I never actually sent, but edited into the thesis.)

Also, my French Composition teacher was very fond of making people write a précis for passages from the writings we studied: the précis has to have 10% of the words of the original text, plus or minus 10 words, and all of the important points have to be mentioned. This is a very difficult exercise, but you learn a great deal from it. Maybe this is the sort of thing your teacher is aiming at, but in a less rigorous way?

(My teacher was completely rigorous about the requirements—if she assigned a précis of a 500-word passage, and you turned in something with fewer than 40 words or more than 60 words, you failed the exercise. The word count was an absolute requirement.)

Think of it like this. When you tell a story about something that happened to you, you usually don’t describe every second of the incident. You usually don’t describe every word of dialogue. You tell a shortened version that hits the highlights of what happened. Well, that’s a summary. You’ve been doing it all your life. You can do it for chapters, too.

I have another concern.What about the thoughts of the character? If the book is in first person, there is going to be a lot of thoughts in the book. How do I translate that into the summary?

Interior monologue is not so different from dialogue that it needs to be treated differently.

stoop cheatttting read the book lol

@Lotsoflaughs: Stop misspelling. Use the dictionary. lol.

You can summarize the main character’s thinking in the third person. “When this happened, the main character’s interior response was _______. The main character responded out loud in this way: _______.” Or “the main character was thinking _____.” You’ll know how to do this if you just think about it a little.

just remember that you’re not trying to mimic the author. you’re trying to pull out the important parts that would be necessary if you were explaining the plot of something to somebody. they don’t need to know the he-said-she-said, they need to know what happened, and why.