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While longer descriptions may appear to provide more information, a concise summary can highlight the most important plot elements. By focusing attention on the larger structures of the plot and leaving out unnecessary trivial detail, a shorter summary can often help the reader to better understand the work.
A good example of this is the List of Benet Academy alumni. (See also Format of the first sentence below.) When the page title is used as the subject of the first sentence, it may appear in a slightly different form, and it may include variations, including plural forms (particularly if they are unusual or confusing) or synonyms .
Sections usually consist of paragraphs of running prose, each dealing with a particular point or idea. Single-sentence paragraphs can inhibit the flow of the text; by the same token, long paragraphs become hard to read. Between paragraphs—as between sections—there should be only a single blank line. First lines are not indented.
Articles start with a lead section (WP:CREATELEAD) summarising the most important points of the topic.The lead section is the first part of the article; it comes above the first header, and may contain a lead image which is representative of the topic, and/or an infobox that provides a few key facts, often statistical, such as dates and measurements.
It can be appropriate to use a list style when the items in a list are "children" of the paragraphs that precede them. Such "children" logically qualify for indentation beneath their parent description. In this case, indenting the paragraphs in list form may make them easier to read, especially if the paragraphs are very short.
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.
Summary style is a good way to give more structure to a long bibliography or list of external links. For example, the World War II summary-style article portrayed above could have a "Further reading" or "External links" section that treats the history of World War II as a whole, while a subarticle on the Pacific War could have "External links ...
The descriptive abstract, also known as the limited abstract or the indicative abstract, provides a description of what the paper covers without delving into its substance. [26] A descriptive abstract is akin to a table of contents in paragraph form.