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Obviously when you're writing a plot summary, you probably won't go into as much careful detail in thinking about every decision—for the most part, some aspects, such as picking what is important and what's not is intuitive, and doesn't require a lot of analysis. However, this example gives a sense of the logic that underlies a good summary.
Show, don't tell is a writing style that favors implying information rather than explicitly stating it. It's more evocative and creative, but it takes more words to convey the same information. When you're summarizing a complex work into several hundred words, it's frequently best to avoid this. Instead, simply and explicitly state everything.
Summary style keeps the reader from being overwhelmed by too much information up front, by summarizing main points and going into more details on particular points (subtopics) in separate articles. What constitutes "too long" varies by situation, but generally 50 kilobytes of readable prose (8,000 words) is the starting point at which articles ...
For example, a summary of Citizen Kane should establish that much of the film is an extended flashback that is bookended by scenes in the film's present; the entire plot summary should still be written in narrative present tense. Summaries may depart from the fiction's chronological order if doing so enhances clarity or brevity.
For example, Van Cliburn's first sentence links to Cold War because his fame came partly from his Tchaikovsky Competition victory being used as a Cold War symbol. The first sentence of a page about someone who rose to fame in the 1950s for reasons unrelated to the Cold War should not mention the Cold War at all, even though the Cold War is part ...
Outlines can be presented as a work's table of contents, but they can also be used as the body of a work. The Outline of Knowledge from the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is an example of this. Wikipedia includes outlines that summarize subjects (for example, see Outline of chess, Outline of Mars, and Outline of knowledge).
Wikipedia's style guidelines determine how we write about fictional works here on Wikipedia; they do not restrict how others write about fictional works. Plot summaries necessarily involve selecting which elements of a fictional work are important enough to include in the summary and are thus secondary, rather than primary, sources.
The graphic is intended to summarize or be an exemplar for the main thrust of the article. It is not intended to be as exhaustive a summary as the text abstract, rather it is supposed to indicate the type, scope, and technical coverage of the article at a glance.
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