Week 3

Summarizing / Outlining to Condense Ideas

Like note taking, summarizing is an excellent way to learn from your reading and to increase
recall. A summary is a brief statement that reviews the key points of what you have read. It
condenses and organizes an author’s ideas or arguments into sentences written in your own
words. A summary contains only the gist of the text, with limited explanation, background
information, or supporting detail. Before writing a summary, be sure that you understand the
material and that you have identified the writer’s major points.

Use the following suggestions to write an effective summary:

1. As a first step, highlight the material or write brief notes for it.

2. Write one sentence that states the writer’s overall concern or most important idea. To do
this, ask yourself what one topic the material is about. Then ask what point the writer is
trying to make about that topic. This sentence will be the topic sentence of your summary.

3. Be sure to paraphrase, using your own words rather than those of the author.

4. Next, review the major supporting information that the author gives to explain the major
idea.

5. The amount of detail you include, if any, depends on your purpose for writing the
summary. For example, if you are writing a summary of a television documentary for a
research paper, it might be more detailed than if you were writing it to jog your memory
for a class discussion.

6. Normally, present ideas in the summary in the same order in which they appear in the
original material.

7. If the writer presents a clear opinion or expresses an attitude toward the subject matter,
include it in your summary.

8. If the summary is for your own use only and is not to be submitted as an assignment, do
not worry about sentence structure. Some students prefer to write summaries using words
1

and phrases rather than complete sentences.

Page
Week 3

Week 3 Instructions

1. Read the text of Week 2.

2. On your Word file of Week 2 you have uploaded into your Google Drive, write your
second paragraph containing the literature review of dopamine hormone (Read Writing
Effective Literature Review file for your additional information). Your reading literature
at least 3 academic articles taken from one selected of the following sources:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/search?qs=dopamine%20hormone
https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=dopamine+hormone&showAll=true
https://link.springer.com/search?facet-discipline=%22Psychology%22&query=dopamine+hormone&facet-content-type=%22Article

%22

3. Your literature review should be similarly indicated by the table form of writing literature
review. Please summarize your 3 selected research articles above as shown in the table
form, and use the table for your own summary. Do not forget to write your ID number,
Name, and Class.
4. The second paragraph should contain 6 to 8 sentences. The sentences should provide a
knowledge gap. The gap is that in selected articles you have found between what has
been done and what is supposed to be done in the current practice and literature.

For example:
The article 1 (2017) researched the people’s dopamine hormone has been strongly
connected with the use of technology. However, the article 2 (2019) did focus on the
dopamine hormone can cause human longevity in family bond. Unlike the two articles
above, the article 3 (2020) resulted the negative effects of dopamine hormone when
related to a working group of sleep deprivation. For this current research, the dopamine
hormone is interestingly researched in the relation between what are the behavioural
effects of people’s religious activities and how medical perspectives view the chemistry
in human brain.

5. Write your second paragraph which tells steps to begin writing and synchronize academic
articles to the first paragraph. Your paragraph is linked to your speaking script to Bu
Zahra’s class later in the afternoon.
6. Upload your file document altogether with your downloaded and selected academic
2

articles to your Week 3 google sub-folder within this week. Failed to do so will reduce
Page

the performance of your writing in this week.