Topic 3: Summarizing This week we look at the skill of summarizing. Summarizing is when we select the most important ideas from a passage (or even a procedure) and integrate them into a compact version which still conveys the same message and is easy to understand and easy to remember. Although this does have some applications for presentations, we want to develop this skill to sharpen our awareness of which ideas are most essential. In the class, students get to practice their listening skills as well. We listen to short speeches on scientific topics and practice summarizing them.