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  3. Summary and synthesis: the difference?

 

Summary and synthesis: the difference?

  • 2 minutes of reading  •  1 May 2022

 

The summary and the synthesis, often used interchangeably, have marked differences. Each has a different objective, process and outcome.

What is a text summary?

Summarizing means gathering the main points of a text and presenting them in your own words in a clear, concise and coherent way.
If you just want to extract the main ideas and condense them in a much clearer and more accessible way, you have to summarize.
There are many ways to summarize, but it is mainly a matter of reducing the number of words to formally present a shortened text to save reading time. However, this must be done while ensuring that the essence of the text remains unchanged.


The final written summary should respect the main principles of the original text and not contradict or transform the idea that the author is putting forward.
The process of summarizing text is used in many professions and workplaces, including schools, educational and training institutes, pedagogy and journalism – it is extremely useful for understand a text quickly, but be careful, it must be more concise than the original text.

Here are the 5 key steps to summarizing a text:

  • First: read the text carefully.
  • Second: break it down into key sections.
  • Third: identify and write the key points of each section in your own words.
  • Fourth: Form a summary of the text by combining these points.
  • Fifth: compare it to the original text.

The summary in a few words:

  • Abstracting is the process of writing a concise version of the original text.
  • The main idea and conclusions of the original text should not be overlooked when writing the final summary.
  • A text summary allows readers to quickly understand a long text and save time.

What is text synthesis?

Text synthesis is an advanced writing technique that gathers ideas and findings from different sources or platforms and combines them to draw a conclusion. During this process, it is ensured that none of the main points of each source are overlooked, and a new interpretation of the original text is generated.
It combines the key points that the original authors highlighted in their respective articles to provide new conclusions and explanations. The idea is to examine the similarities and differences between the sources and create a new text that shows readers where ideas converge and diverge. By extracting the ideas of the original authors, we obtain an interpreted and reformulated text.


In teaching and education, synthesis is still widely used to instill the power of reasoning and critical thinking in students, who examine a variety of sources to show how everything fits together. Most of the time, students write capstone essays for their college courses – literature reviews are an example of a capstone.

Summary in brief:

  • Synthesis is the technique of gathering information from different sources to write a new text in which you formulate your own verdicts.
  • It is widely used in educational and vocational institutes to teach critical thinking and formulate an opinion.

How does Resoomer help you summarize and synthesize a written text?

Via algorithms, Resoomer text summarizer, works efficiently to filter the main points of a text, extract the most important information, and provide you with a text summary focused on the topic.
It eliminates transitional phrases, unnecessary clauses and excessive examples from the original text and reduces it to the essentials. Whether it’s an article, report, thesis, analysis, technical studies or other, you can summarize them all using Resoomer.


And that’s not all. Resoomer also helps to synthesize. Using two or more different texts, Resoomer will identify the key points of your documents and highlight them for you, so you can use them to create your own conclusion.
Improve your productivity, save time and energy, summarize and synthesize efficiently using Resoomer – the ultimate free online text summarization tool.

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