#Best way to summarize a paragraph update#

Step 2: Split the text into parts.īreak the text into smaller parts to make it easier to read and understand. Skim the article again to make sure you understand the main points and reread any essential passages or hard to understand. Look over the article quickly to get an idea of what it’s about and how it’s put together.Ĭarefully read the article, underlining essential parts and making notes as you go. It’s often best to read something in three steps: You should read the article more than once to understand it fully. Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash Four Steps To Write a Good Summary: First, read the text. In any case, summarizing is to give your reader a clear understanding of the source.

Add in-text citations and make sure you’re using the right style.

Do you remember something important wrong, or have you forgotten it? Does your summary sound a lot like the original? Then you should explain how those ideas support or contradict your own.

Just use your notes to tell someone else what the main ideas of the original author were.

Think about how the ideas from the source relate to the argument(s) you are making in your paper.

Write down what you think the main idea and supporting points should be in your summary.

Carefully read the passage to get a complete picture of what it means.

Choose a short passage (one to four sentences) that backs up a point you made in your paper.

You should write the summary in your own words as much as possible. Don’t take phrases and words from the passage. Write down essential ideas in the passage before writing the summary. Don’t use quotes, metaphors, similes, and other figurative languages. If you think an example is significant, it might be added to the summary.ĥ. Most of the time, it’s easy to do without examples and illustrations. In summary, you can’t repeat the same ideas over and over.Ĥ. The author may have used different words to say the same thing in the passage to make it stand out. Since you already know what the passage is about, it should be easy to figure out what is essential and what isn’t.Īnything that has nothing to do with the main idea is unimportant and shouldn’t be included in the summary.ģ.

Reread the passage and try to understand every sentence as much as possible.

The title should say in a few words what the main idea is.

Key ways to summarize a passage effectively How do you Summarize a Passage?Įxamine the provided passage to find out: With some quick mental math, 100 tokens = 75 words, I’d estimate the maximum size this prompt could possibly work for would be 2000-3000 words, given that you’re using the Davinci model with the max_tokens set to 4096.How do you summarize a passage? It will save you time to summarize a paragraph as you read it, especially if you are not particularly interested in the topic. However, it should be noted that longer texts may be more difficult for this prompt to handle accurately. The result is the shortest possible summary that retains all of the original meaning and context of the paragraph.Ĭompared to similar prompts, this prompt is quite effective at summarizing short texts. TLDR generation involves high source compression, removes stop words and summarizes the paragraph whilst retaining meaning. We introduce Extreme TLDR generation, a new form of extreme summarization for paragraphs. Personally, seeing other people’s prompts has been the best way for me to learn about prompt writing and that’s why I wanted to share this prompt.

Another user responded with the best prompt I’ve come as far as maximally compressing the information in a short text. In a recent Reddit thread, a user asked about the best ways to summarize a paragraph using GPT-3.

This next prompt is similar but returns the summary in a list format. The actual prompt text is only two lines and many fewer words than in the past prompt, which was written for the text-davinci-002 model. One of the benefits of ChatGPT is that the prompts don’t have to be as complicated as in other GPT-3 models.Īs you can see, this prompt is straightforward.

#Best way to summarize a paragraph update#

ChatGPT was recently released, so I wanted to update this post with valuable new prompts for summarizing.