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Citations may or may not appear in a plot summary. The work of fiction itself is the primary source, and doesn't usually need to be cited for simple plot details. Secondary sources are needed for commentary, but that generally shouldn't appear in a plot summary. Citations are appropriate when including notable quotes from the work.
A plot summary is a retelling, a summary, or an abridged or shortened précis of the events that occur within a work of fiction. The purpose of a plot summary is to help the reader understand the important events within a work of fiction, be they of the work as a whole or of an individual character.
The plot summary for a work, on a page about that work, does not need to be sourced with inline citations, as it is generally assumed that the work itself is the primary source for the plot summary. However, if the summary includes a direct quote from the work, this must be cited using inline citations so that readers can easily verify it ...
The term plot can also serve as a verb, as part of the craft of writing, referring to the writer devising and ordering story events. (A related meaning is a character's planning of future actions in the story.) The term plot, however, in common usage (e.g., a "film plot") more often refers to a narrative summary, or story synopsis.
An article about a novel should include a concise plot summary which highlights the most important events and developments without attempting to follow every twist and turn of the story. A plot summary should be written in the narrative present tense. A summary for a full-length novel should be between 400 and 700 words.
Story structure or narrative structure is the recognizable or comprehensible way in which a narrative's different elements are unified, including in a particularly chosen order and sometimes specifically referring to the ordering of the plot: the narrative series of events, though this can vary based on culture.
An example of a "bonus material" style inner story is the chapter "The Town Ho's Story" in Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick; that chapter tells a fully formed story of an exciting mutiny and contains many plot ideas that Melville had conceived during the early stages of writing Moby-Dick—ideas originally intended to be used later in the ...
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."