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A summary is not meant to reproduce the experience of reading or watching the work. In fact, readers might be here because they didn't understand the original. Just repeating what they have already seen or read is unlikely to help them. Do not attempt to re-create the emotional impact of the work through the plot summary.
In a plot summary, where you have limited space, you might choose technical terms over their more simplistic alternatives. Remember to wikilink terms that may not be understood in context. "A mobster gives the mercenary a variety of weapons as well as a UN passport that has to be injected under the skin of the neck."
In applying summary style to articles, care must be taken to avoid a POV fork (that is, a split that results in either the original article or the spinoff violating NPOV policy), a difference in approach between the summary section and the spinoff article, etc. Note that this doesn't mean that an article treating one point of view is ...
The length should conform to readers' expectations of a short, but useful and complete, summary of the topic. Few well-written leads will be shorter than about 100 words. The leads in most featured articles contain about 250 to 400 words. Lead sections that reflect or expand on sections in other articles are discussed at Summary style.
An executive summary (or management summary, sometimes also called speed read) is a short document or section of a document produced for business purposes. It summarizes a longer report or proposal or a group of related reports in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material without having to read it all.
Right now this page is called, "Wikipedia:How to write a plot summary". At some point it might be nice to revise it and rename it to Wikipedia:How to write a summary. Saying "plot" presumes that this policy only covers fiction.
An edit summary is a brief explanation of an edit to a Wikipedia page. Summaries help other editors by (a) providing a reason for the edit, (b) saving the time to open up the edit to find out what it's all about, and (c) providing information about the edit on diff pages and lists of changes (such as page histories and watchlists).
It is not to be confused with the general context of the term "outline", which is a summary or overview of a subject presented verbally or written in prose [7] (for example, The Outline of History is not an outline of the type presented below). The outlines described in this article are lists, and come in several varieties.