When you write descriptive essays, summaries, research papers, exam answers, or other writing to give a picture of something, even if you are not proving a point, you can use the form described in Writing Tip #1.

If you consider this form as a basic structure onto which you hang your ideas and details, you can easily see that it provides a means for organizing information. Your writing need not resemble a grocery list of assorted facts and ideas; instead, you provide a strong controlling point, which the details support.

Summaries are not the only types of descriptive writing; you have encountered and perhaps written other descriptive pieces designed to give a picture of a place, event, thing, or idea. Or you may have described the process involved in performing some activity. Narrative also describes in that it tells someone's personal story. But we focus here on summary because it's so useful in academic writing.

In a summary, the thesis is not your own conclusion. Since you are describing what someone else said, wrote, or did, you tell what his or her position/thesis or action was. You describe the main point of an essay as just what the author's thesis said, and the supporting evidence for your descriptive thesis (which is really the author's thesis) comprises the points the author used to support his thesis. Because you're describing another author's work and telling what that author wrote, you need only report what he or she said. You need not tell what you think of the essay, or say whether or not you agree with the author or his/her ideas, or take any other analytical position. When you describe someone else's writing, you need only tell WHAT you find.

What then, you ask, goes into the body of the summary? That's an easy question to answer. You use some of the same details the author used (the most important ones); you can organize them according to the author's pattern, or you can reorganize them to support the thesis briefly and efficiently. In most cases, the more selecting and reorganizing you do, the more your description approaches analysis. Most descriptions of written work are summaries or abstracts; they say the same things the original author said, but they reduce the length by omitting some details or "fluff"--unimportant words or phrases that don't carry much meaning.

Finally, you come to your conclusion. Here's your opportunity to wrap up the descriptive summary by presenting an overview of the original work. The conclusion also offers you the chance to express your opinion about the original piece. If you are writing an objective, somewhat terse summary, such as an abstract in 150 words, you will want to follow standard abstract form, which dictates objectivity only. But if you are writing a summary, not a formal abstract, the end gives you a chance to go ahead and inject your opinion, or tell the reader where to find associated information, or even tell the reader what to do with the information you have gleaned from the original text.

In other descriptive writing, your conclusion could summarize the key point of your narrative, the process you described, or the picture you "painted" with words.