Is a summary a conclusion?

[Bucharest]

Have exercise to do with very advanced students. Have to put various link words into various categories...most are self-explanatory....however/therefore that sort of thing.

I am left with 2 that neither I nor the students are sure about

"To summarise...." is that reaching a conclusion, sequencing, giving an alternative (clearly not), giving supporting information or explaining?????

Most people I have asked have plonked it into "reaching a conclusion" because I suppose you tend to put a summary into a conclusion........But is a summary a conclusion in and of itself? I don't think it is....I wonder if it might be "explaining" (because surely, you're going back and paraphrasing what you've said before?

I think it is explaining in the sense that a summary is a brief overview of an entire document (in reports I write for work trying to get a decision out of directors etc I always put an executive summary in a box at the top of the doc so they know broadly what report says and what decisions they need to make). A conclusion is the final logical step in an argument/thesis/ essay in my view.

I think 'explanation' myself. A summary is encapsulating what went before. A conclusion is an end result.

I would have thought that a conclusion is something that you conclude- ie having weighed up the evidence you conclude that X is Y, or not. The summary is the concise version of the evidence that you present before you draw your conclusion, and the explanation is how you drew the conclusion from the evidence that you have summarised. It happens in every Poirot mystery- he gets all the suspects into a room, summarises what happens, concludes who the murderer is, and explains how he worked it out.

Having said that people often say "in conclusion" before something that is in fact a summary, but IMHO if you're not drawing a conclusion that didn't exist at the beginning of your article, you can only really summarise, not conclude.

What prism said. A summary outlines what's been said so far, a conclusion states an outcome (e.g. a new train of thought/opinion) that has arisen from the summary.

Summary : We wanted to know whether Greggs sausage rolls were any good so we went to our local Greggs and bought some. After having tasted them, we concluded that they were crap.

Conclusion: Greggs sausage rolls are crap.

Thanks all!

Well, I chickened and re-designed the whole bloomin' exercise adding another category "summarising" and then found a similar exercise where "to summarise" was plonked into the "explaining" category....which was one of the contenders.....

I know what a summary is, and I know what a conclusion is, it's just these wanky categories they have me putting the phrases themselves into that don't seem quite right somehow. Oh well....

Ta again!