.

With a quality nonfiction summary, it’s possible to read or share information in a fraction of the time that it would take to use the original piece.

Even though there’s pride attached to the number of titles I read every year, I rather read a few great books, than several average ones. Most of the main details from the article can likely be included in the summary, as long as you trim out any extra stuff in the original piece that isn’t necessary to communicate the information. The summary should include everything that is important from the original while cutting out what isn’t essential in order to deliver the fundamental points as quickly and directly as possible.

So, for example, if the original piece was 2,000 words, you might aim to have a summary of between 200 – 400 words. It could be history, science, or just about anything under the sun – there are millions of pieces of nonfiction literature out there in the world to explore.

Summaries are a great way around the volume of content within nonfiction writing that you may encounter.

For an always up-to-date list of the books I read, you can follow me on Goodreads. My summaries are “as long as they need to be” depending on the quality of the book.

Aim to Hit These Four Key Characteristics

If you want to have some guiding lights for how to summarize a nonfiction book, the four points below should be tremendously helpful.

Best Books by Year

Apart from working on a handful of book summaries, at the end of each year, I reflect on the best books I read. According to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, for instance, Americans were down to reading less than 16 minutes per day as of 2018.

The foundation of nonfiction writing is delivering information on a specific nonfiction topic.

Rather than needing to wade through the content manually to pull out what is important, you can just turn the attention of an AI model toward the nonfiction piece and watch it work some magic. Simply put, if the summary is not accurate and does not properly represent the work that it is summarizing, it is useless.

Neutrality: There is no room for personal opinions or perspectives in a summary of nonfiction literature.

Developing an accurate, informative nonfiction summary for a piece of literature can feel like an intimidating task, but it doesn’t have to be that way. A lot of AI tools are free to get started, so you don’t need to delay trying it out for yourself to see what they can do when summarizing nonfiction text. But for those who can wait, here are the annual lists of all of the books I’ve read so far:

3.

Using this table as a guide, you can get started on your first one right away and refine your process with experience. If you need to make an important choice – such as how to proceed with a business project, for example – you can read summaries from many different pieces of nonfiction work that will all provide you with helpful insight into how you can make such a choice.

In addition to making sure a summary is concise, it also needs to be as clear as possible.