Basic tools of description: Tables

Abstract

Tolstoy’s War and Peace is a very long book. It would not be possible to do such a book justice in any way other than to read it from cover to cover. However, this takes a lot of time and concentration, each of which may not be readily available. If we want to simply get a gist of the story, a shorter summary is adequate. A summary reduces the thousands of words that make up the original book down to a few hundred, while (hopefully) retaining some of the essence of the story. Of course, the summary will leave out a great deal, and the way the book is summarized for one purpose will be different from the way it is summarized for another. Nevertheless, although much is lost, something is also gained when a book so large is summarized effectively.