Summarisation is an essential skill for postgraduate students to deal with an academic text. Many students end up not effectively distilling the essence of the text.

There are four common difficulties learners face in summarising an academic text.

1. Difficulty in identifying the main ideas and distinguishing them from supporting details.

Academic texts are commonly complex and have a lot of details. The amount of information provided makes it difficult to understand and filter out the key points.

Learners who have a framework, of how to make sense of academic text can identify the main and supporting points.

2. Struggling to condense complex information into concise summaries.

Some students lack skills in simplification. That is simplifying complex ideas to explain to non-specialist readers.

Simplifying key complex ideas is the backbone of effective communication. In general, one is not going to explain to someone all the time, but simplification is a skill that helps in understanding complex texts efficiently.

3. Balancing the need to include important details while avoiding unnecessary repetition.

While reading an academic text, all the information seems important. Until someone is not taking notes, it becomes difficult to decide if some information is already taken into consideration.

This leads to reading the same information again and again in one form or another.

Having a framework for efficient note-taking can help in dealing with this problem.

4. Managing time effectively to read and summarize multiple texts within deadlines.

For postgraduate students, a lot more content is supposed to be read in the stipulated time frame.

Making a reading list is an important step to deal with the volume of readings that expect to read.

Different strategies can be adopted to read content for different purposes.

One can adopt different strategies to deal with each of the reading-related problems. And, postgraduates can read an academic text efficiently for maximum outcome with limited time investment.