Working with Summaries

The Summary quotation type is primarily meant for condensing very long text passages. The goal is to have an understandable representation of the text before you. You can mix other quotation types in as well. Pithy formalations can be quoted literally (with page numbers!). You can also insert your own thoughts, commentaries and references to other works. It makes sense to add some notes to help orient yourself if you combine different types of excerpting in this way. You'll want to make sure that you still adhere to the conventions for excerpting individual quotations and thoughts.

• A good rule of thumb is to insert page ranges next to your summaries of the text.
• Passages that you excerpt literally need to be set in quotation marks and need to include the page range from which they were taken.
• Page changes have to be noted when you've quoted text literally. Text from notes should also be noted as such with the note number and page number.
• It must be clear what you have formulated on your own and what came from the text you are summarizing.

For this type of excerpting it may be advisable to use letters or symbols to stand for certain things. For example, you may want to use parentheses for page ranges, brackets for page changes of direct quotations, and double brackets for your own comments or an abbreviation such as K:. If you do this, just make sure that the meaning of each symbol is clear to you and that you use them consistently.

The advantage of all of this work is if you go back to your summary later on, you will be able to read the summary almost as if it were an essay and will still have access and understand the context of the information included in the summary. The disadvantage is that you may not be able to accurately cite items in your summary.

Using Core Statements

You don't just need to use core statements to reflect the content of a knowledge item. Core statements can also be used to describe the function of an excerpted text. For example, you may want to give the core statement for a documentary excerpt the name "Chapter 1" or "Chapters 4-6". Make sure to enter the Page range so that your summary appears in the correct order on the Quotations & comments tab.

The same applies for core statements that are more content oriented. You can give an indirect quotation or a summary a core statement such as "Educational techniques for information literacy courses [= Chapter 3.1]“ (or: "Chapter 3.1: Educational techniques for information literacy courses“). This lets you see at a glance what section you summarized and what the main ideas were.