summarise

To summarise is to give the main points and leave the rest out. A friend who missed the meeting asks what happened, and you take twenty minutes down to four sentences.

It works on anything with too much in it: summarise a chapter, summarise the argument, summarise a year of figures in one chart. The spelling depends on where you are, summarise in Britain and summarize in the United States, and the same choice runs through summarised and summarising. The noun is a summary, and 'in summary' is what you say just before the short version. Keep it apart from 'sum up', which is the casual spoken twin, and from 'resume', which in English means to start again, whatever the similar word does in your language. A summary is shorter than the original, and if yours is not, you have paraphrased instead.