To maintain readability, plot summaries should have just enough detail to give readers an understanding of the work. Occasionally, you'll find excessively detailed plot summaries that overwhelm readers with a summary of every scene. In this case, it's frequently best to rewrite the plot summary from scratch. If you come upon a plot summary of around 800 to 900 words, it's frequently possible to streamline it such that you lose no significant information. The context may change slightly, but it is usually not terribly important. If you're unfamiliar with the work in question, then it's probably best to stick as closely to the original wording as possible.

Examples[edit]

Meaningless or unnecessary words

English has many meaningless and redundant words. These are typical of informal speech, but in formal writing they give unnecessary emphasis, or purple prose. It's easy to remove these. Some words can always be removed: actual and its derivatives serve no purpose. Also, Just and some are frequently unnecessary:

It's usually obvious when things happen after one another, so then can often be deleted:

Other examples of needlessly verbose phrases include "as well as", "in addition to", "in order to", "in an effort to", etc:

Some things are just too obvious to say:

What else are pirates going to do? Have tea with the landlubbers? Pirates do not need their motivation explained. It's implied by their name.

Deciding to do something

In Wikipedia plot summaries, fictional characters frequently decide a course of action. You can remove the bit about making a decision:

You don't have to describe every step of the process. In more complex scenarios, you may be able to streamline the preparatory phase by rewording. Depending on the context of the scene and the themes of the work, you might also be able to streamline later phases.

Successful attempts

A related concept is the successful attempt. If it's obvious, there's no reason to tell us that the attempt is successful:

If the attempt failed, you can often simplify that, too:

Starting to do something

Is it necessary to tell us that someone has "started to" row a boat? Why not just say that he's rowing the boat?

Setting and year

People like to explicitly state the setting of a story even when it's irrelevant. The worst writing uses "in the year", which is pointlessly verbose.

In-universe dates are probably extraneous details.

Identifying scenes and transitions

The goal is to describe a film's plot, not its editing. Identifying specific scenes or transitions is unnecessary.

Post-credits sequences are usually throwaway gags and probably not worth mentioning. If the sequence is important, integrate it into the summary as normal; there's no need to mention that it comes after the credits.

Adverbs and adjectives

The quickest and easiest way to streamline a plot summary is to strip out unnecessary adjectives and adverbs. You need to use your judgment, but you can often tell a sentence is too flowery when it has multiple modifiers.

If the plot is short enough, you can let through some extra detail. If it's 1000 words, then the flowery words should be the first casualties.

Modern English is a weird language with German, Greek, and Latin roots. There's almost always a way to rephrase imprecise words instead of using modifiers:

"Body" is a word of Germanic origin that can refer to living or dead people; "corpse" is a word of Latin origin that can only refer to a dead person.

Streamline modifiers that don't add useful detail:

One doesn't need to explicitly mention that this car is being driven, and using the adjective "speeding" is more concise. Flipping the subject and object changes the scene in what is probably an inconsequential way.

Countdowns and timelines

These are endemic in thrillers where some nasty event will take place in exactly one week. Variations include ghost stories where the protagonists are cursed and will suffer a horrible fate in one week, a police thriller where time counts down until a bomb goes off, a crime thriller in which a parent has a limited amount of time to rescue a child, etc. Let's focus on the ghost story:

Often you can compress day-by-day reports into a sentence or two. For example, assume that the first 20 minutes of a feature-length film depict a couple who slowly come to believe in a supernatural curse. You need to speed through this to describe the main plot, which takes up the remaining runtime: "Although initially skeptical, the couple experience unexplainable phenomena. By the end of the week, they have become frantic." Those 18 words can replace an entire paragraph of unwarranted detail in a 1500+ word plot summary.

Quotations and catchphrases

Generally, these don't add anything to the reader's understanding of the plot. Iconic catchphrases might be warranted, but others should probably be moved to Wikiquote. In most cases, it's possible to paraphrase a quotation down to half its original length. Keep in mind that quoting any specific bit of dialog will place potentially undue emphasis on it.

Detailed descriptions of death scenes

In horror films, especially slasher films, it's traditional to spend much of the runtime on gory deaths. Fans often like to embellish these scenes with too much detail, such as the exact manner of death. In a long plot summary, this can be removed.

Romantic prose

People sometimes like to amp up the romance. You can save a few words by making the descriptions more matter-of-fact.

Unless it's terribly important to the plot, you can replace detailed descriptions of sex acts with "they have sex". Editors sometimes emphasize characters' nudity, which may be irrelevant to the plot.

Speculation, extrapolation, and interpretation

Don't speculate about the implications of plot events, try to extrapolate from them, or make personal interpretations. Be careful not to violate WP:FILMPLOT: "Do not make analytic, synthetic, interpretive, explanatory, or evaluative claims about information found in a primary source." Instead, summarise what concrete information the film gives us and no more.

Writing styles

What works in creative writing might not fare as well in an encyclopedia article. Changing the writing style is often a more time-consuming affair than simply removing excess adverbs and adjectives.

Show, don't tell

Show, don't tell is a writing style that favors implying information rather than explicitly stating it. It's more evocative and creative, but it takes more words to convey the same information. When you're summarizing a complex work into several hundred words, it's frequently best to avoid this. Instead, simply and explicitly state everything. Remember to avoid original research and personal analysis of the work as much as possible.

This writing style is most commonly found in a long, descriptive paragraph rather than a single overwritten sentence. 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.

Passive voice

As much as English teachers hate passive voice, it's a legitimate part of English. When it's used unnecessarily, it bloats a sentence. You can reword these sentences to use active voice:

Sometimes long sentences are written in passive voice so that the writer can string along several clauses:

It might take a bit of work to disentangle the phrases, order them properly, and decide which details are extraneous. If the elf queen doesn't figure any further in the story, why even mention her? Use your judgment.

Editors may also use passive voice to "zoom out" and describe a scene out-of-universe:

This often happens when describing the final scene of a film.

If the subject is obvious or unknown, you can also use passive voice to streamline a sentence:

Purple prose

Purple prose overwhelms the reader with unnecessary detail written in flowery language. Remember "it was a dark and stormy night..."? That's purple prose. Although purple prose is traditionally found in creative writing, excessively detailed and flowery writing can creep in anywhere. Sometimes the opening or closing scene of a work is described in loving detail:

Poetic clichés and metaphors are also good candidates for pruning. While they may make you sound creative and intelligent, it's often easier to flatly state something rather than get poetic about it.

Jargon

Normally, you want to avoid unnecessary jargon. In a plot summary, where you have limited space, you might choose technical terms over their more simplistic alternatives. Remember to wikilink terms that may not be understood in context.

In this case, I decided "subdermal" was not technical enough to bother linking, but others may disagree, obviously.

Other resources[edit]

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