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A plot summary is not a recap. It should not cover every scene or every moment of a story. 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.
A log line or logline is a brief (usually one-sentence) summary of a television program, film, short film or book, that states the central conflict of the story, often providing both a synopsis of the story's plot, and an emotional "hook" to stimulate interest. [1] A one-sentence program summary in TV Guide is a log line. [2] "
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.
A synopsis (pl.: synopses) is a brief summary of the major points of a subject or written work or story, either as prose or as a table; an abridgment or condensation of a work. Synopsis or synopsys may also refer to: Video synopsis, an approach to create a short video summary of a long video
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.
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.
At any particular point of the story, as it unfolds, there is a now, and hence a past and a future, so whether some event mentioned in the story is past, present, or, future changes as the story progresses; the entire description is presented as if the story's now is a continuous present. —Frungi 05:09, 14 March 2013 (UTC)
In these cases, you can often replace the entire paragraph with a single sentence that explicitly states the central idea. For example, if a paragraph shows how a character becomes increasingly stressed, replace it with "Bob becomes increasingly stressed". This is unnecessary in shorter plot summaries.