Nonfiction Summary: What It Is and How to Write It

Nonfiction Summary: What It Is and How to Write It

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Summarizing a Piece of Nonfiction Literature: A Step-by-Step Guide

There is more information available in the world today than at any other point in human history. This is a great benefit of living in the modern world, to be sure, but it does come with some drawbacks. Specifically, it can be intimidating to figure out what information to consume – one survey reported that 27% of workers in 2022 felt overloaded with information. 

Summaries are a great way around the volume of content within nonfiction writing that you may encounter. With a quality nonfiction summary, it’s possible to read or share information in a fraction of the time that it would take to use the original piece. Summarizing nonfiction is easier than you might think – especially if you get a little help from modern summarization tools – and everything you need to know about this topic can be found in this article. 

What is a Nonfiction Summary?

As you would imagine, a nonfiction summary is simply a shortened version of an original piece of nonfiction work. The summary should include everything that is important from the original while cutting out what isn’t essential in order to deliver the fundamental points as quickly and directly as possible. Delivering points quickly is important in today’s environment, as despite the abundance of information available, the time spent reading by the average person is declining. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for instance, Americans were down to reading less than 16 minutes per day as of 2018.

The foundation of nonfiction writing is delivering information on a specific nonfiction topic. It could be history, science, or just about anything under the sun – there are millions of pieces of nonfiction literature out there in the world to explore. With a good summary of a given piece, it’s possible to capture what is important and valuable from that writing without spending the time it would normally take to make it through the original from start to finish. 

While saving time is a big part of nonfiction summaries, it’s not the only thing that matters here. There is also something about reading a summary that is actually easier and more approachable than reading the original, and a good summary can make the information in the piece more accessible to a wider audience. Some dense nonfiction may contain insights that could be valuable to many people who would never be able to wade through the original writing to extract the key points.

Aim to Hit These Four Key Characteristics

If you want to have some guiding lights for how to summarize a nonfiction book, the four points below should be tremendously helpful. 

  • Accuracy: Above all else, your summary needs to be accurate. Simply put, if the summary is not accurate and does not properly represent the work that it is summarizing, it is useless. This is where everything starts in the world of summarization. 
  • Conciseness: The whole point of a summary is to save time and deliver the main points quickly, so it has to be concise to be useful. Work on cutting it down to just the core components and you might be surprised at how short a useful summary can be. 
  • Clarity: This kind of goes right along with the previous point, but it is a bit different. In addition to making sure a summary is concise, it also needs to be as clear as possible. This means it doesn’t have any jargon or confusing wording that will make it difficult to read and utilize. 

Neutrality: There is no room for personal opinions or perspectives in a summary of nonfiction literature. Stick strictly to the information as it is presented in the original work. If you want to include personal opinions in your summary, you are looking for an analysis, our Summary vs Analysis article will help you with that.

The Value of Nonfiction Summaries

We have already written about the time-saving aspect of nonfiction summaries, and that’s probably going to be one of your primary motivations for using them. You could be a professional trying to learn as much as possible on a given topic, an educator trying to present ideas to a class, or a student trying to learn – there is an angle for everyone to use summaries. 

Another way to see the benefit of summarizing nonfiction is to look at how it can benefit your decision-making process. If you need to make an important choice – such as how to proceed with a business project, for example – you can read summaries from many different pieces of nonfiction work that will all provide you with helpful insight into how you can make such a choice. Where you would have never had enough time to read all of the content in each of the original pieces, summarizing them and using that for your education is approachable and practical.

Utilize This Step-by-Step Process

At this point, let’s get down to the business of how to write a nonfiction summary that will be useful for yourself and your audience. The table included below outlines a seven-step process for how you can work through a nonfiction piece of literature and come away with an excellent summary that will be useful for anyone who reads it. 

Of course, with this manual approach, the very first step is going to be a time-consuming one, especially for longer pieces. If you are trying to produce a summary so you don’t have to actually read the entire original piece, you’ll want to look at high-tech solutions such as AI tools like our ReadPartner AI. We’ll discuss that in detail later in this article. 

Step Description Purpose
#1 – Read the Text Carefully read the entire piece This step will give you the big picture needed for a good summary
#2 – Highlight Key Points Identify the main points Break down the piece into its core components
#3 – Identify Supporting Details Choose examples from the original Using examples from the work will help you support the points made in the summary
#4 – Write in Your Own Words Bring your own tone You don’t just want to copy/paste from the original – your words should have their own tone (remember to not add bias to the summary)
#5 – Be Concise Cut things down As your summary grows, make a point to trim what you don’t need
#6 – Organize Logically Review your overall structure Make sure the summary took the right shape as it came together
#7 – Revise and Edit Give it a final review Confirm that your summary is clean, free from errors, and accurate

There is likely to be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to producing quality nonfiction summaries. Using this table as a guide, you can get started on your first one right away and refine your process with experience. You might find that tweaking these steps a bit works best for your needs, and that’s just fine. 

Adjusting Your Approach to Suit the Project

While the general idea of a nonfiction summary is going to remain the same across all types of works, the implementation of this practice will vary a bit from one project to the next. For instance, if you need to summarize an entire nonfiction book, it’s a good idea to focus on the main chapters and draw inspiration from the introduction for how the summary is going to be structured. You’ll obviously never get every detail from the book into the summary, so it’s the biggest picture view that needs to be taken. 

When it’s an article that is the target of your summarization, things get a lot simpler. Most of the main details from the article can likely be included in the summary, as long as you trim out any extra stuff in the original piece that isn’t necessary to communicate the information. Before you start any summary project of nonfiction writing, think about the form that the original piece takes and then tailor your approach accordingly. 

Can AI Make Nonfiction Summarizing Easier?

Without a doubt, using AI technology is a great way to produce nonfiction summaries. Rather than needing to wade through the content manually to pull out what is important, you can just turn the attention of an AI model toward the nonfiction piece and watch it work some magic. 

Of course, you will want to have the right AI tool for the job, and there are many of them out there today. However, when it comes to drafting summaries, you’ll be in the right hands by using our very own specialized summary tool ReadPartner AI. Our tool is easy to use, will help you create a quality summary of any nonfiction work and you can speed up your summarization process even more by adding the ReadPartner Chrome AI Summarizer Extension to your browser. 

Frequently Asked Questions

Creating quality nonfiction literature summaries is a challenging task, and you probably have a lot of questions about how to do it right. To hopefully find answers to some of those questions, check out the FAQs below.

Is it better to summarize nonfiction manually or with an AI tool?

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There are advantages to both, but it’s hard to overlook the power of AI in terms of saving time and making sure the finished product is accurate and contains all of the right information. Using a tool like ReadPartner AI is a great opportunity to get started on nonfiction summaries quickly and easily.

Should a nonfiction summary include any personal perspectives or opinions?

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No – this is outside of the scope of a nonfiction summary. The point of this task is to accurately represent the information that is included in the original nonfiction piece while shrinking the length of the text significantly. You aren’t trying to bring any new point of view or perspective to the information, you are only attempting to summarize the writing accurately.

How long should a nonfiction literature summary be?

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There is no hard and fast rule for how long a summary should be in this application, but start by aiming for a summary that is roughly 10% - 20% of the length of the original. So, for example, if the original piece was 2,000 words, you might aim to have a summary of between 200 – 400 words. Of course, it won’t always be practical to stay within these constraints based on the complexity of the original work, so some judgment will be required.

Nonfiction Literature Summaries Made Easy

People of all ages enjoy nonfiction reading, with this interest starting from an early age – as many as 75% of young readers opt for nonfiction instead of fiction when picking their own book. Developing an accurate, informative nonfiction summary for a piece of literature can feel like an intimidating task, but it doesn’t have to be that way. Leaning on ReadPartner AI for help on this task can go a long way toward allowing you to save time and produce an excellent finished product. As it’s free to get started, you don’t need to delay trying it out for yourself to see what this powerful tool can do when summarizing nonfiction text. Try it out now!

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