One of the most useful single pages I’ve read over the last couple of years is Dr. Phil’s system for coding social science journal articles (use Amazon’s “Look inside” feature to see the coding summary on page 3). I was reminded of it at the start of the year when I was trying to extract the argument structure from one of the attention papers, and again when reading and writing literature reviews during TMA04. Dr Phil’s Summary of Previous Literature (SPL) definition describes the art of summarising perfectly:
This process entails a tremendous amount of condensation, taking complex ideas and reducing them into paragraphs, sentences, and if the author is brilliant, one word.
Every journal article you read (especially experimental reports) will be full of SPLs, but an example from the summary of language processing (OU students only) jumped off the page for me.
Homophones can be miscategorized (Van Orden, 1987)
On the one hand I was a bit dismayed that a 15,000 word paper which I covered in about 300 in my literature review last year could be so well summarised in just 4! On the other, knowing the paper fairly well I appreciated such a concise but accurate summary (although, following the Feynman technique, I would actually add an example)
Homophones can be miscategorized (Van Orden, 1987). For example, the word ROWS might be miscategorised as A FLOWER as it is phonetically similar to ROSE.
The art and skill is to select the words that save others the extensive time and effort required to find and read the primary source (see TMA03 for an example). I would actually go one step further and say that using no words is one pole of this continuum i.e. choosing to write nothing because it isn’t relevant to a TMA or exam question is a type of summarising.
Beyond The Earcanal 