Chapter 10

Summary: How It Can Greatly Improve Your Memory

Summaries give you just what you need and it is cool you know how to create them.

Being able to summarize things is a very useful skill and can significantly increase the amount of information you have in your memory.

Many times, we are tempted to want to commit a whole piece of information to the memory. However, this is usually unnecessary. Besides, doing so will take a considerable amount of time.

The truth is that what we need to know in today’s world is just too much, and you will never have enough time to study all of them or commit all of them to memory. This is the reason working with a summary is very important in today’s world.

Even if you are a memory champion, it will take a considerable amount of time to fully commit a 10-pages document to your long-term memory. If this is the fate of a memory champion, what of many who are not?

Who Can Benefit from Making Summaries?

Some people appear to benefit more than others from using a summary. These groups of people are mentioned below.

1. Someone Who Reads a Lot of Books

People who read many books in a year will benefit from making summaries.

It appears that the more you read, the more you forget.

This is partly because your brain will categorize a sizeable amount of what you read as unimportant and will not bother to store it in the long-term memory. This happens a lot when you read books.

So, if you make summaries, you can intentionally tell your brain what is essential in a book and what needs to be stored in the long-term memory. You may want to say that this will take some time, but we believe it is worth it. What is the use of reading books if you can’t remember the crucial parts of the book after a while?

Creating a good summary will allow you to tell your brain what information to keep. This should make you remember the most important aspects of a book.

2. An Infovore

An Infovore is someone who consumes a lot of information. This information can be from the internet, publications, interviews, books, etc.

Remembering all that you read is nearly impossible if you devour information. One way to ensure that you remember more of what you read is to physically or mentally create summaries of what you read or listen to.

When you are creating a summary physically, then you are actually writing it down, but when you create it mentally, you are merely thinking about it or saying it out to your hearing. Both approaches are useful, depending on your situation. However, writing a summary down can give you a better chance to remember it.

3. Just Anyone Who Wants to Consume More Information and Remember More

If you want to consume and remember more information, then consider learning about how to write a good summary.

Apart from telling your brain what to remember, a good summary also makes it easy to revise a piece of information if you need to. Please see below to learn how to make a good summary.

How Does Summary Help Your Memory?

When you make summaries, it is easier to commit the summaries to the memory using memory techniques like the method of loci or visualization and association as compared to committing the original information to memory.

When you put more summaries into your memory using various memory techniques, it becomes easier to use memory techniques to memorize other kinds of information. All these will benefit your brain in the long run.

Besides, having a lot of summaries in your memory will boost your confidence, and this should help when used appropriately.

That said, so how do you summarize like a pro?

How to Make a Good Summary

There are few things to put at the back of your mind when summarizing a piece of information. These things are:

1. Keep the summary as short as possible.

Make sure your summary contains the lowest number of words you can use to express the idea contained in the original text. You will not want your summary to be a tedious piece of content.

2. Make sure the main message of the information still appears in your summary.

You will not want your summary to bring in new ideas. Generally, people should be able to get the original information from your summary.

3. Make sure you reference the original source in your summary.

Some people will still want a detailed information (and not just the summary), and referencing the original source will help with these kinds of people.

4. Make sure you use your own words as much as possible when writing a summary.

Your summary should be a redacted version of the original text. However, the idea in your summary must still reflect what is found in the original text you are summarizing.

5. Make sure you don’t forget what people are looking for.

As much as possible, try to include whatever you believe people will be searching for in your summary. For example, it may not be good enough to summarize the World War II without talking about what caused the war, those that fought it, when it started and how it ended.

6. Don’t be too afraid to leave out some information that may appear important in order to make your summary concise and straight to the point.

Always remember that a summary is meant to showcase just the most essential pieces of information in a write-up, book, interview, or discussion. A summary is never meant to include everything. Writing a good summary usually involves excluding some information that you don’t want to.

These types of information may include catchy and interesting facts. Generally, writing a good summary includes disciplining yourself to only add just what is enough to make a good account of an idea and nothing more.

7. Use the topics and the subtopics in a write-up, publication, or books as a template.

Usually, the author of a write-up, publication or book will organize information based on topics and subtopics, and you can get the inspiration of what to include in your summary by looking at the topics and subtopics (or chapters and sub-chapters) in a piece of information.

Summary Examples

Let’s now use specific examples to explain how to make a good summary.

Example One

Let’s assume you are asked to summarize what happened in World War II to your kid.

Note: It is crucial you give the summary of the war to your kid without bothering him or her with unnecessary details.

World War II lasted between 1939 and 1945. The war was majorly fought between two opposing sides, namely: the Axis and the Allies.

The Axis contains Germany, Italy, and Japan.

The Allies majorly contain France, United Kingdom, United States, Poland, the Soviet Union, and China. Besides, the Allies also include some less powerful nations.

Most countries making up the Axis, and the Allies joined the war at different stages.

Some countries like the Soviet Union also switched sides.

The Axis was fighting to become the superpowers and expand their influence, and the Allies were fighting to prevent this.

World War II featured the use of sophisticated weapons and powerful aircraft — the most important of this being an atomic bomb.

Generally, the World War II began with the invasion of Poland by Germany and ended with the surrender of Japan.

If you are to observe the summary of the World War II above, you will notice that many details are absent in the summary.

Generally, this is how a summary should look like. A summary should be devoid of unnecessary details as much as possible. A summary is only meant to bring the most important aspect of a book, write-up, publication, or interview to mind, if you need more details, then you should go back to the original source.

In addition, we expect your summary of the World War II to be different from ours. This is because what we deem important may be different from what you consider important. Just make sure that you avoid unnecessary details when writing a summary.

Example Two

Let us attempt to summarize all we have been saying about writing a good summary and its benefits. All that we have been saying can be summarized in three lines:

A good summary involves writing succinct information about a publication, book, interview, or write up. It involves avoiding unnecessary details as much as possible. When a summary is done properly, it can help you remember what you read and improve your memory.

What about Applications for Summarizing

Some applications allow you to summarize your articles. These types of apps mainly work by identifying the main ideas in your text and using it to form a summary of the text. Even though the mode of operations of these kinds of apps is cool, you may not get the best forms of summaries using them.

If you must use the summary apps to make summaries, we will recommend you only use them to make drafts. Then work on these drafts yourself to get a better quality summary. We are saying this because the summary created by these types of apps may be lengthy or some crucial information omitted.

In addition, some of these (summary) apps will quote the texts in the original article word-for-word to make the summary instead of redacting the article or passage to make it more concise.

In a nutshell, you can use the summary app to make a summary but do this only if you are ready to make more corrections to what you get from these apps.

In the next chapter of this guide on memory techniques, we are going to be discussing the most important thing to always do if you want to remember a piece of information for a long time. You can access the chapter here.