WRITING SKILLS

Writing skills in the academic context mean acquiring of basic writing skills including searching for information , using in a reasonable way and presenting it in a logical order (brainstorming, outlining prewriting, editing, rewriting, summarizing).

Summarizing

What Is Summarizing?
Summarizing is how we take larger selections of text and reduce them to their bare essentials: the gist, the key ideas, the main points that are worth noting and remembering. Webster's calls a summary the "general idea in brief form"; it's the distillation, condensation, or reduction of a larger work into its primary notions.

What Are We Doing When We Summarize?
We strip away the extra verbiage and extraneous examples. We focus on the heart of the matter. We try to find the key words and phrases that, when uttered later, still manage to capture the gist of what we've read. We are trying to capture the main ideas and the crucial details necessary for supporting them.

http://www.teach.virginia.edu/go/readquest/strat/summarize.html

How to summarise
There are three processes which you need to use to produce an effective summary.
These are:
- selecting main ideas and regrouping and recombining them
- generalizing and categorising ideas from your understanding of the text
- deleting details that are not important to the overall meaning of the text
(Brown & Day, 1983; Kirkland & Saunders, 1991)

http://www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au/learningconnection/student/learningAdvisors/summarise.asp