Summaries have a lot of different uses. They can be used by authors when they want to give a brief abstract of their books to their readers. They can also be used when bloggers want to give a snippet or a sneak peek of their posts and articles to their readers.
But, here’s the thing.
Creating a summary manually can be a bit hectic. You have to read through all the stuff to make sure that you don’t miss out on any important details or points. To do that, you may have to write down all the major points separately and then create a summary by keeping all those in mind.
So, instead of doing all this, there is a much easier process that you can work with. And that is to just use an online tool instead.
In this post, we are going to look at a step-by-step guide on how you can create a short summary using an online tool. Before that, we will also look at a bunch of other stuff as well. Read on till the end, and you’ll have a good idea about creating a summary using an online tool.
What is a Summary?
Before we delve into the steps that you have to take in order to create a summary, let’s first understand what a summary actually is.
A summary can be defined as a shortened form of a piece of content that serves to describe the main ideas and concepts mentioned in it. The length of the summary should be around 10% of the original content.
For example, if the original text is around 1,000 words, then the summary should be around 100 words at most.
The purpose of the summary is to let the reader know what the content is about without them (the readers) having to read through the whole thing.
Step-by-Step Guide on How to Create a Summary Using an Online Tool
With that out of the way, let’s move ahead to look at how you can create a summary using an online tool.
1. Pick a Summarizing Tool
Well, the first and obvious thing that you need to do is pick a tool.
There are actually quite a lot of summarizing tools that you can find on the internet nowadays. Some of them are good, some are meh while some are just plain bad.
That is pretty much the reason why we mentioned this as a separate step. You have to be careful and mindful when picking a summarizing tool. You don’t want to end up with a lousy tool with lousy working that gives out lousy outputs.
Such a tool may not even manage to get all the main points of the original content, and it could end up making a summary using a bunch of unnecessary and useless sentences.
This is, by the way, a good place to mention that majority of the summarizing tools online doesn’t actually create a summary. Rather, they just take meaningful sentences from the given content and join them together.
Coming back to our point, here are some things that you should check in a summarizing tool before selecting it for your use:
- It should be free to use.
- It should have an intelligent, AI-based functionality.
- It should have a good user base.
While you can pick any summarizing tool that fits the above criterion, we are going to be using the summarizer tool by Prepostseo for the purpose of this guide. However, the steps that you have to follow are pretty much the same in most tools so it doesn’t really matter which one you choose.
If you want, you can also pick the one by Prepostseo so that you can have an easier time following this guide along.
2. Enter Your Content
Once you have selected the tool that you are going to use for creating the summary, you need to enter your content into it.
Now, depending on the tool that you are using, you will have different options that you can use for this purpose. For example, some tools allow you to directly type the text in while some can also give you the feature of uploading a file from your system’s storage.
Some tools can even go as far as to provide cloud storage integration, which allows you to basically import documents from places like Google Drive and Dropbox.
The tool that we are using i.e., the summarizing tool by Prepostseo, allows the users to enter the content directly into the input space, and it also gives the option of direct file uploads.
After you are done importing the content, you can move on to the next step.
3. Specify the Summary Length
This is an option that is provided by most summarization tools.
Basically, once you are done entering your content in the tool, you have to specify how long you want the summary to be.
Depending on the tool that you are using, there could be different specifications that you can choose from at this stage. For example, some tools may allow you to enter the exact amount of words that you want the summary to have. Other tools may give you the option of specifying the percentage.
The summarizing tool by Prepostseo, which we are using for the sake of this tutorial, gives two options in this regard. You can either enter the exact number of words that you want the summary to have, or you can select the output length by percentage.
4. Complete the Process and Save the Results
After you have specified the length, you can go ahead and start the process. In most tools, this will have to be done using a button of some sort. There can be some tools in which the work is in real-time. In other words, the summary is formed as you enter the content and specify the length.
After the summary has been generated, you can go ahead and save it to your device. Once again, depending on the tool that you are using, there can be different options that you can use at this stage.
Some tools may only allow you to copy the results while some can be more generous, and they can also provide the feature of downloading the file directly to your local storage.
Conclusion
So, there you have it.
That was a step-by-step guide on how you can create a summary using an online tool.
The exact working and interface will obviously vary depending on the tool that you are using, but the general steps are more or less the same as we have pointed out in the post above.
