PTE Summarize written text | FREE PTE Tutorials

The writing section in PTE Academic consists of just 2 types of questions – summarize text and essay writing. There can be up to 2 questions of each type in your exam. PTE Summarize written text is similar to the traditional summary writing tasks you might have done in your school time English classes.

In PTE Summarize written text questions you will receive a short to mid sized text – usually a paragraph or couple of paragraphs on a particular topic. Your task as the name of the question type suggests is to write a summary clearly explaining the main theme and the key ideas of the text.

There are some PTE specific requirements – the summary that you write must be only one sentence long! Further it can’t be more than 75 words. To say the least it needs to be crisp and to the point.

Can you guess which sections this question type contributes to?

Yes! You are right if you have said – Writing as well as Reading! After all if you can’t read and understand the text correctly you will not be able to write the summary.

For each question you will receive 10 minutes – i.e. 10 minutes to read the text and write the summary. How well you do depends to a large extent on how wisely you use these 10 minutes.

If you approach the task randomly, you will end up with a random result.

Therefore, we advise you to follow a system!

1. Read the text from top to bottom as you try to identify the main theme of the text. How will you do that? Well! main theme is the one around which the rest of the text revolves. You will see references to it in various forms throughout the text. For e.g. if the text is on electric cars, the whole text may include examples of popular electric cars or the problems that electric cars solve or the benefits of electric cars, etc.
2. Start by writing 2-3 sentences that according to you convey the essence of the text. If someone was to read just these few sentences they should be able to tell what the whole text is about.
3. Once you have boiled the whole text down to 2-3 sentences combine them to form one single sentence. You can use conjunctions and other sentence connectors. You might also have to refine the sentences further and leave out the unnecessary. Keep only the core in the text.
4. Examples, anecdotes, statistics, and any other supporting information is not the core of the text. It is just that – supporting information. For e.g. You can just say – “Electric cars are expected to contribute to emission reductions in a major way in next two decades.” You don’t need to include statistics or percentages telling how much reduction.
5. Review and improve the summary. Once you have written the summary review it in the last couple of minutes of your given 10 minutes for that PTE Summarize written text question. In your review you can improve the vocabulary used – more complex words for simple words, synonyms or similar words instead of repeating the same word again and again, etc.

We have written a detailed article on the tips and tricks you can follow for PTE Summarize text – PTE Summarize Written Text Tips and Tricks! Make sure to check that out.

Ultimately your score will depend upon a few things:

1) How well you capture the key information – If you miss out the main points nothing else will matter.

2) The grammatical correctness of your response – Often when people try to combine sentences or compress a lot of information in under 75 words, they end up making mistakes. You should try to avoid that.

3) Diversity of your language and vocabulary – The PTE software does not want to see a response which has the same few words repeated again and again. Impress it by showing your large vocabulary.

In today’s world where we are flooded by information, PTE Summarize Text is an easy question type to practice. Pick any newspaper article or anything written on an academic or professional or news website like npr.org and try to write the gist of it. You will find you will get a hang of it in no time!

For more structured practice – authentic PTE summarize written text questions, in a real exam like PTE software get a PTE Mock Tests package and take the shortest path to success in PTE!