The summary may be just one or two sentences, to explain the
main idea of the article, and perhaps compare it with another
summarised text, or it might be necessary to include much
more detail. In other words, a summary can range from 1–2%
of the original to more than 50%: summarising is a flexible tool.
At first students need to follow a series of steps to summarise
successfully. With practice the number of steps may be
reduced, as the process becomes more automatic.