What's a summary and how's it different from a conclusion?

A summary is a brief restatement – or recap – of the main points you've presented in your discussion. Although it will often precede the conclusion, it's also sometimes presented as part of the conclusion. In either case, though, it's a way of reminding your reader of the main ideas you discussed so that the conclusion can be read and understood more easily with those ideas fresh in their mind.

As the quotation that begins this chapter indicates, students sometimes confuse summaries and conclusions, so let's begin by making a simple distinction between the two. A summary, because it's merely a restatement of ideas already mentioned, adds no new information. A conclusion, on the other hand, does add new information: it takes the ideas discussed in the body of your writing and then implicitly asks (and explicitly answers) the question, ‘What general observations can we make about those ideas? What do we learn from them? What do they tell us?’ In other words, a conclusion makes general statements about the ideas presented in your main discussion; statements containing ideas that will most likely not have appeared elsewhere in your writing. The new information comes not from adding to those ideas but by commenting on them.