Synthesizing, Outlining, and Summarizing a Text

Site:	Saylor Academy
Course:	ESL004: Advanced English as a Second Language (2020.A.01)
Book:	Synthesizing, Outlining, and Summarizing a Text

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Date:	Friday, 4 April 2025, 11:44 AM

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Synthesis: The Believing and Doubting Game
Outline the Text
Summarizing
Summarizing Guide
Sources

Synthesis: The Believing and Doubting Game

Now that we understand previewing and annotating strategies for academic texts, let's learn how synthesizing, outlining, and summarizing help to read a text critically.

Peter Elbow, a scholar of rhetoric and writing, invented a close reading strategy called the "Believing and Doubting Game" that will help you analyze a text from different points of view. Here's how to "play".

The Believing Game – Imagine you are someone who believes (1) what the author says is completely sound, interesting, and important, and (2) how the author has expressed these ideas is amazing or brilliant. You want to play the role of someone who is completely taken in by the argument in the text, whether you personally agree with it or not.
The Doubting Game: Now pretend you are a harsh critic, someone who is deeply skeptical or even negative about the author's main points and methods for expressing them. Search out and highlight the argument's factual shortcomings and logical flaws. Look for ideas and assumptions that a skeptical reader would reject. Repeatedly ask, "So what?" or "Who cares?" or "Why would the author do that?" as you read and re-read.

Once you have studied the text from the perspectives of a "believer" and a "doubter", you can then create a synthesis of both perspectives that will help you develop your own personal response to the text (as in the image above). More than likely, you won't absolutely believe or absolutely reject the author's argument. Instead, your synthesis will be somewhere between these two extremes.

Playing the Believing and Doubting Game allows you to see a text from completely opposite perspectives. Then, you can come up with a synthesis that combines the best aspects of each point of view.

You are role-playing with the argument, first analyzing it in a sympathetic way and then scrutinizing it in a skeptical way. This two-sided approach will help you not only better understand the text but also figure out what you believe and why you believe it.

Outline the Text

Outlining the argument of a text is a version of annotating and can be done quite informally in the margins of the text unless you prefer the more formal Roman numeral model you may have learned in high school. If you're interested in analyzing its ideas, identify what each paragraph says. Are there any patterns in the topics the writer addresses? How has the writer arranged ideas, and how does that arrangement develop the topic?

If, however, you're concerned with the way the ideas are presented, pay attention to what each paragraph does: does it introduce a topic? Provide background? Describe something? Entice you to read further?

Outlining enables you to see the skeleton of an argument: the thesis, the first point, and evidence (and so on), through to the conclusion. With weighty or difficult readings, that skeleton may not be obvious until you go looking for it.

Learn more about how to outline a text by watching this video.

Take a look at this sample outline

Summarizing

This strategy accomplishes something similar to using an outline, but in sentence and paragraph form, and with the connections between ideas made explicit.

Restate a text's main ideas in your own words, leaving out most examples and other details. This approach can help you both to see the relationships among those ideas and to understand what they're saying.

When you summarize material from a source, you both condense and restate the main points concisely in your own words. This technique is appropriate when only the major ideas are relevant to your paper or when you need to simplify complex information into a few key points for your readers.

Generally speaking, a summary must at once be true to what the original author says while also emphasizing those aspects of what the author says that interest you, the writer. You need to summarize the work of other authors in light of your own topic and argument. Writers who summarize without regard to their own interests often create "list summaries" that simply inventory the original author's main points (signaled by words like "first", "second", "and then", "also", and "in addition"), but fail to focus those points around any larger overall claim. Writing a good summary means not just representing an author's view accurately but doing so in a way that fits the larger agenda of your own piece of writing.

The following is a template to get you started on creating summaries:

[Author's credentials] [author's first and last name] in their [type of text] [title of text], published in [publishing info], addresses the topic of [topic of text] and argues/reports that [argument/general point]. [Author's surname] claims/asserts/makes the point/suggests/describes/explains that _____.

Here's the template in action:

English professor and textbook author Sheridan Baker (1996), in his essay "Attitudes", asserts that writers' attitudes toward their subjects, audiences, and themselves determine the quality of their prose to a large extent. Baker gives examples of how negative attitudes can make writing unclear, pompous, or boring, concluding that a good writer respects and considers his audience.

In this example, the first sentence identifies the author (Baker), his credentials (English professor and textbook author), the type of text/genre (essay), the title and date, and uses an active verb (asserts) and the relative pronoun "that" to explain what exactly Baker asserts. The second sentence gives more specific detail on a relevant point Baker makes.

Here is an example of a text and summary (note this is just an example, not medical advice):

Original text:

Over the past few years, a number of clinical studies have explored whether high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets are more effective for weight loss than other frequently recommended diet plans, such as diets that drastically curtail fat intake (Pritikin) or that emphasize consuming lean meats, grains, vegetables, and a moderate amount of unsaturated fats (the Mediterranean diet). A 2009 study found that obese teenagers who followed a low-carbohydrate diet lost an average of 15.6 kilograms over a six-month period, whereas teenagers following a low-fat diet or a Mediterranean diet lost an average of 11.1 kilograms and 9.3 kilograms respectively. Two 2010 studies that measured weight loss for obese adults following these same three diet plans found similar results. Over three months, subjects on the low-carbohydrate diet plan lost anywhere from four to six kilograms more than subjects who followed other diet plans.

Howell, Adrienne. Assessing the Efficacy of Low-Carbohydrate Diets. 2010

Summary:

Adrienne Howell (2010) points out that in three recent studies, researchers compared outcomes for obese subjects who followed either a low-carbohydrate diet, a low-fat diet, or a Mediterranean diet and found that subjects following a low-carbohydrate diet lost more weight in the same time.

The summary follows the original order of ideas, maintains the original tone, is much shorter, and is properly attributed.

Note: Although ideas in the summary are expressed in your own words, specialized or clinical terms used in the original text may need to be used again. In this sample summary, the term "obese" is used because synonyms such as "heavy" or "overweight" have a different clinical meaning.

Watch this video to further understand the important connection between summarizing and synthesizing.