OPINION: Do We REALLY Need Summaries in Essays?

They’ve been a key part of professional essays for a long time. Are they even necessary?

By Joshua Cook

Essays aren’t exactly the easiest thing to produce. This is kind of a big part of it, their entire role is to be a giant wall of text (maybe with some breaks in it) about a certain subject that serves to get your point across very thoroughly about this subject. Summaries can be argued to be the most significant part of essays. Summaries have a rough definition of an overview of topics, key points and key supporting details discussed previously in the essay, all condensed into one paragraph usually shorter than a body paragraph designed to be objective, accurate to what has been discussed and one last defense on what makes your points correct or important to hear. They’ve been a part of essays for as long as essays have existed, an essay can’t even be classified as an essay by most sources without a summary but one thing I’ve always wondered is why they’re even a necessity in the first place.

It might be a ridiculous idea to suggest at first, that summaries aren’t needed in essays, but it’s rooted in at least a little logic. First of all, I feel like questioning what the need for conclusions was in the first place. After a bit of research, the general consensus around why they’re needed is so comprehension is built better around materials that the essay is about while also demonstrating your progress in this understanding and improving the conciseness of an essay. And to this I say; what is the point of the above body paragraphs? What is the purpose of the already-conducted research surrounding the essay’s topic? Would, fundamentally, an essay not be more concise without the conclusion? By asking students to create a summary while making the meaning behind their constructions for increasing conciseness and improving subject understanding you are undermining what they’ve already done in their hard work making the essay come to life, or just come to be in the first place.

Summaries in essays also, inherently, have a root in laziness. If you’ve already read an essay, there is no need for a summary. What, were you not following along? Is your memory bad enough to the point that I need to spoonfeed all of the information you already read about? If you skipped to the end of the essay looking for answers or a stance, why not read the entire thing? Do you not have, at most, 10 MINUTES to look at MY work that I put HOURS into? It’s disrespectful, to say the very least, to suggest any of the above reasons, convenience for a reader and reinforcing memorization, are valid reasons summaries should exist. Train your brain to memorize stuff better. The human brain can hold approximately 1,000-2,500 TERABYTES of information, it would be an insult to evolution or whatever god you might believe in, who created YOU in THEIR image, not to train your brain to its fullest potential. I can assure you a few pages wouldn’t hurt when this much storage is enough for about a FULL DAY of 4K video.

Another big reason I feel summaries aren’t actually needed is because they’re primitive. While I’ve already said summaries have been a part of essays for as long as professional essays have existed, I said this without acknowledging the fact that summaries have existed since the early 19th century. Since then, AI has become a very large force in the education system for both students and teachers, with, according to some studies, up to 86% of teachers using AI in some sort of way and averages throughout several studies coming to a conclusion that ~60% of teachers utilize it in some way. (figures vary heavily between studies, some such as edweek report as small as 32% of teachers admitting to use AI but this is still almost one-third of teachers). So, why write summaries if your teacher can just take (literally) a minute to paste your writing into something like ChatGPT and read the summary from that? Yes, it’s less reliable and less authentic but it’s still what the greater majority is doing, statistics don’t lie. (Advisor’s note: statistics like the above are, in fact, often made up and used to lie all the time) Students can do the same thing if they need a summarization of their work, for whatever reason.

Also, around when summaries were introduced to standard essays, they were longer. As mentioned prior, it was in the early 19th century that summaries were introduced, and essays have actually, on average, gotten shorter over time. Restraints in publication made the range of lengths for essays more lenient, while the standard switching from handwritten pages to typewriters to 20th century computers to 21st century computers have made essays easier to write while also still being “longer” even if not in word or page count. Basically, a part of the reason why summaries aren’t needed is because they were made for longer essays, not the 5-page ones that most seem to be receiving nowadays.

It’s also worth noting that nobody else will be seeing your essay aside from yourself and your teacher (who can make a summary of your work themselves, as mentioned earlier) making summaries limited in use. This is unless other students view it, but other students shouldn’t be making use of your summary since the point of a summary to others is to provide a quick recap of all that is discussed in the essay and if undergoing a rework like this the student should be looking at the entire thing, not just the summary, on top of not all essays having the option for fellow student revision, again limiting their use cases.

In conclusion, I’m not writing a conclusion. You can decide whether I should’ve based on what I’ve already said.