Summaries Aren’t Scripts
There are lots of good reasons to write summaries of your thesis, your research or aspects of both as part of your viva preparation.
- Writing a summary helps you to focus on what matters.
- A summary can help you to collect and organise your thinking.
- Creating a summary can help you to identify what matters too.
A summary can be a list of points or a page of paragraphs, written in ten minutes or drafted carefully over an hour.
A summary is not a script though. You might use a helpful question to prompt writing: there are many viva question resources on the internet that provide these. Still, your examiners are not expecting memorised responses and hyper-polished notes that you read from.
The summary helps you prepare for the viva. It’s not a script to read from during the viva.