Producing Written Summaries: Task Demands, Cognitive Operations, and Implications for Instruction

Theoretical views regarding the cognitive processes of summarization are reviewed and some of the specific cognitive operations involved in summarization are considered. In particular, we argue that the cognitive demands of summarization are dependent upon the qualities of the text to be summarized, the whereabouts of the text during summarization, and the type of summary to be produced. To this latter point, a distinction is made between a summary written for oneself (writer-based) and a summary written for others (reader-based). Developmental differences among summarizers are then described in terms of awareness of task demands, sensitivity to importance, and ability to condense material and select and create topic sentences. Finally, instructional suggestions are made for how the beginning summarizer might be taught to produce more sophisticated summaries.