Ever stopped to think how much summarizing you do--without even trying? At the dinner table, if someone asks about your day, you don’t tell them every single thing that happened--you just describe the highlights, or the way you felt about the day’s events. After arguing with a sibling, you might provide a summary of the conflict while trying to get a parent on your side. Likewise, a summary might be a good approach if your friends want to hear about a sleepover they missed out on. If you don’t want them to feel even worse, you shouldn’t tell them every cool thing you did!

Whether you’re describing a personal experience or the main ideas in something you were asked to read, your summary should include only the most important parts: the main idea and a few key supporting details. After all, most members of your “audience” expect summaries to be short and to the point.

Take a look at the passages below. How would you summarize each one? Can you cover the main ideas in one sentence? Or no more than two? Think about how you would summarize each passage. Then click the passage to compare your ideas to the example.

The southern Confederacy’s defeat in the Civil War brought an end to the shameful practice of slavery and marked the beginning of the end of the plantations. Other farming practices had to take their place, and newly freed slaves needed a way to support themselves and their families. To many, sharecropping seemed like a solution.	The plantation system, which relied on slavery, ended after the Civil War, but was replaced by sharecropping, which seemed like a solution to new freed slaves in search of a way to survive.
After Lincoln’s death, the task of Reconstruction fell to the new President, Andrew Johnson. Johnson was from the South and wanted to make conditions as easy as possible for white citizens of the southern states. In 1865, Johnson ordered that all southern land be returned to its original, pre-war owners. The former slaves who had been given land had only two choices: they could become homeless refugees, or they could sign labor contracts with the landowners.	Andrew Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s death, was raised in the South. He sympathized with white landowners instead of freed slaves and ordered that all southern land be returned to them, forcing former slaves to sign labor contracts with the land’s original owners--or face starvation.
Between 1865 and 1870, a period known as Radical Reconstruction, Congress passed new laws to establish the rights of black southerners. These included the 14th and 15th Amendments, which granted African Americans equality under the law and the right to vote. However, Southern states found ways around these laws. Starting in the late 1800s, state and local laws were passed to segregate blacks from whites in all aspects of public life, including buses, restaurants, restrooms, and schools.	Between 1865 and 1770, Congress passed the 14th and 15th Amendments, which made African Americans equal to whites, at least on paper. However, the Southern states passed their own state laws to keep blacks and whites segregated--and to reinforce the lower status of African Americans in Southern society.
Sharecropping was better than slavery, but sometimes not by much. Both white and black sharecroppers were often at the mercy of dishonest landlords. In some cases, tenant farmers were forbidden to sell their crops to anyone except the landlord, who could set a low price. These conditions often combined with other factors out of sharecroppers’ control, such as bad weather and crop diseases, to keep poor farmers from getting ahead.	Sharecropping wasn’t much better than slavery because dishonest landlords forbade tenant farmers from selling their crops to anyone else--then bought the crops at a set low price to keep poor farmers from getting ahead.