Scrivere come pratica sociale: riassumere per capire e per studiare

This reflection on the summary in the context of higher education, reiterates the importance and the complexity of this textual practice. The summary is a type of text that is doubly relevant at the university level: firstly, it can be useful in an academic writing curriculum, for example for the final dissertation, which also uses the students’ capacity for synthesis in relation to specialist literature. Secondly, it is a daily practice – both in listening and reading –when taking notes during lessons or reworking study texts. This article, which reports the results of a survey conducted in an Italian university, discusses the link between reading, understanding and writing summaries to show the connections between the various elements of this process and the critical issues that may emerge in the summaries of undergraduate students. The results invite further investigation on the topic, and lead to active teaching of the summary as a textual practice. We are aware the summary as a technique for reworking a given text cannot be limited to a technique for textual reduction, but relies on deep reading.