2. Keep the tone as objective as possible. You're not critiquing the article, you're giving an overview of it.

3. Start by defining the research question. Toward the beginning of the article, possibly in the introduction, the authors should discuss the focus of the research study and what the targeted objectives were for conducting the research. This is where your summary should begin.

 •Describe, in your own words, the main argument the authors hope to prove with their research. In scientific articles, usually there is an introduction which establishes the background for the experiment or study, and won't provide you with much to summarize. It will be followed by the development of a research question and testing procedures, though, which are key in dictating the content for the rest of the article.

4. Discuss the methodology used by the authors. This portion discusses the research tools and methods used during the study. In other words, you need to summarize how the authors or researchers came to the conclusions they came to with first-hand research or data collection.

•The specifics of the testing procedures don't usually need to be included in your summary in their entirety; they should be reduced to a simple idea of how the research question was addressed. The results of the study will usually be processed data, sometimes accompanied by raw, pre-process data. Only the processed data needs to be included in the summary.

5. Describe the results. One of the most important parts of the summary needs to be describing what the authors accomplished as a result of their work. Were the authors successful and did they meet their objectives for conducting the research? What conclusions have the authors drawn from this research? What are the implications of this research, as described in the article?

•Make sure your summary covers the research question, the conclusions/results, and how those results were achieved. These are crucial parts of the article and cannot be left out.

6. Connect the main ideas presented in the article. For some summaries, it's important to show how the relationships among the ideas presented by the authors develop over the course of the article. The primary objective of the summary is to present a brief overview of the authors' essential points to the reader, making it important that you unpack those arguments and explain them in your own words. Fill in the blanks and assumptions, helping to clarify the research and summarize it briefly.

•This is sometimes more important in summaries dealing with articles in the humanities. For example, it might be helpful to unpack dense arguments about poet George Herbert's relationship to the divine with more pedestrian summaries: "The author seeks to humanize Herbert by discussing his daily routines, as opposed to his philosophies."

7. Don't draw your own conclusions. A summary of an article shouldn't editorialize, or offer your own interpretations of the data, unless explicitly stated as part of the assignment. In general, the point of a summary is to summarize the authors' points, not to offer your own additions and editorials.

•This can be difficult for some inexperienced research writers to get the hang of at first, but remember to keep the "I" out of it.

8. Refrain from using direct quotations of text from the journal article. Quotations are more often used when writing a college paper or essay, and are less important for a journal article summary. Focus more on paraphrasing the ideas when writing a journal article summary without losing focus of their meaning and intended content.

9. Use present tense. Always use the present tense when you are discussing the contents of a scholarly article. This will help you maintain a parallel grammatical structure throughout.

10. Revise a Piece of Writing/Revise your draft. Good writing happens in revision. Go back and compare the focus and content of what you have written to see that it matches and supports the context of the journal article. A journal article that has been properly summarized provides potential readers with a short review, which is important when they are browsing and searching for specific information about a particular topic.

Unit IV. II. Practice

 1. Tasks for paper organization