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The audience for a summary would be those who have not read the original; perhaps they'll read the summary to decide if they need to consult the original (that's the purpose of a scholarly abstract). For this reason, the summary must make sense to someone who has not read Sterling's original text.
The summary should be an informative, rather than merely descriptive, summary. Descriptive summaries are very brief, and describe the content:
"In this essay, science fiction writer Brice Sterling describes some examples of obsolete media." Obviously, that's too easy. An informative summary tries to condense the main ideas of the original into a brief abstract. As such, you'll need to decide which ideas are the main ideas.
Although you will all summarize the same text, each summary will be slightly
different; the act of summarizing is also an act of interpretation. You will
need to decide which points to include and which to exclude for reasons of
space. Whatever you decide, the summary must be accurate and as complete
as possible given the word limitation.
This work is licensed under a Creative
Commons License.