14 Summarizing

 

The principle of summarizing is simple: to condense relevant information into a narrative shorter than the original. This may be done in writing, with a voice or video recording, by resorting to schemes and maps. The output format depends on the assignment or the context in which the summary may be produced. More challenging is that adjective, “relevant”. When we are transforming a reading into a summary, how do we decide what to include and what to leave out? What is relevant?

Naturally, this also depends on the audience. Understanding your audience is an important part of every informative activity. Even after you have determined your audience, selecting what can be left outside your summary requires attention.

As a first rule of thumb, it is safe to include in your summary the WHEN and the WHAT. Communicate clearly to your audience what the subject of the matter is, and when did it take place. This gives context to your readers. Let’s start with a short paragraph, which opens a longer piece on feasting in ancient China:

 

“The archeological record from the late Shang up through the Warring States period is intimately tied to mortuary practices. From oracle bones found in temples and bronze inscriptions found in tombs (or in caches) to the disposition of the feast vessels in the tombs themselves, we can draw a picture of the role of food in the early feasting context in which ancestral spirits were active participants.”[1]

 

This is already a short paragraph. What is it telling you? 1) You are going to learn about archeological record. 2) This record pertains ancient China, specifically the period from the Shang to the Warring States. 3) The dispositions of objects and the nature of this record can be used to understand practices of feasting. All these 3 aspects are important. Yet in a summary, you can reduce the information given for each point. For example, the summarized version could be:

“The archeological record from the late Shang up to the Warring States period is important to understand how food was used in mortuary practices.”

This is very short, and while it does not go into details about what the archeological record comprises, where it was found, or its physical arrangement in tombs, it addresses all 3 points listed above.

The situation gets a bit more tricky when you are summarizing pieces that I call multi-vocal, where multiple voices are represented: that of the author of the piece, those of ancient authors (factual or attributed) whose voices come through in the sources cited as evidence, and those of other people who analyzed the same material and had a different understand of it. Let’s consider this other example, from Miranda Brown’s “Mr. Song’s Cheeses”:[2]

IN 1504, AN EXPERT ON gastronomy recorded a recipe for a stuffed pasta: Start with the wrapper, prepared by mixing flour together with eggs and water. After rolling out the dough and cutting it into small squares, add the filling to make a pocket, pressing the ends of the dough to seal. A number of fillings could go in: “One version uses fresh cheese. Add poppy seeds, sliced scallion whites, powdered prickly ash, ground carda- mom, and salt. Mix evenly to make the filling” (Song 1504a: 2/5b). Readers may be surprised to learn that this recipe came from a text written in Chinese, Mr. Song’s Book of Nourishing Life (Songshi yangsheng bu 宋氏養生部). The only hint of possible Chinese origin, in fact, is the powdered prickly ash, better known as Sichuan peppercorns.

Our surprise at the recipe’s Chinese origin naturally owes much to the fact that the main ingredient was a crumbly fresh cheese, made from cow’s milk. Today, “Chinese food” seems no closer to “cheese” than chalk. In the popular imagination, Chinese cuisine simply does not “do” dairy. In his recent global history of milk, Mark Kurlansky (2018: 214) sums up this view: “China has an extraordinarily diverse cuisine and an an- cient and revered gourmet tradition. However, throughout history, the Han, as the ethnic Chinese call themselves, as op- posed to the Mongolians, Tibetans, and other ethnic groups living in the area, have rarely eaten dairy food.”

Here, Kurlansky mouths received opinion, as few historians have been willing to admit that the ethnic Chinese once enjoyed their dairy; the presence of dairy in premodern China is one of the best-kept secrets among historians.

 

These first two paragraphs open the article. Here you have three voices: that of Song Xu, author of the Book of Nourishing Life, that of Mark Kurlansky cited by the author of this article, and that or Miranda Brown, author of the article, who counters Kurlansky’s statements.

One way to summarize this is to use the multi-vocal nature of this piece to your advantage. For example, you could summarize it to the following:

“In her piece on the production of cheese in Chinese history, Miranda Brown uses Mr. Song’s Book of Nourishing Life by Mr. Song to dispute the notion that Chinese diets did not include dairy food.  Mr. Song’s Books of Nourishing Life, written in the early 16th century, includes a recipe for stuffed pasta whose ingredients lists fresh cheese.” 

In this paragraph, you are communicating all the necessary without all the detail provided in the original. For example, in the summary version we do not know who previous stated that Chinese cuisine did not include dairy food. Yet this does not matter in a summary, especially given that the piece is about cheese in Chinese history, not what Mark Kurlansky did or did not say about the topic.


  1. Constance Cook in Sterckx 2005.
  2. Brown, Miranda. 2019. “Mr. Song's Cheeses: Southern China, 1368-1644.” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies 19 (2): 29–42. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2019.19.2.29.

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