The Most Efficient Way to Write a Summary

Roughly 600 pages of theory sit between you and a pass on the D3 Theory exam, and no amount of staring at them makes the pile any shorter. That is the wall every Diploma student walks into. The way through it is not reading harder, it is summarising smarter: shrinking that mountain into something your brain can actually hold on the day it counts. In this article I walk through four strategies for summarising severely dense content, what to put in, what to leave out, and why a handwritten summary quietly beats a typed one every time.

What Summarising Actually Does

Summarising is the process of condensing complex information into a concise, digestible form without losing its essence. When you are preparing for the D3 Theory exam, doing it well becomes close to essential, purely because of the sheer volume you have to cover. A well-crafted summary does not just help you memorise the information, it deepens your comprehension by pulling out the key concepts and showing how they relate to each other. And we all know how much we need to talk about the whole concept of things when answering exam questions.

What to Put In Your Summary

• Key concepts. Identify and highlight the main ideas and principles covered in the text. These are the foundational elements, the framework everything else hangs on.
• Supporting details. Pick the relevant examples, illustrations and evidence that make the key concepts land. This is the context that reinforces understanding.
• Relationships and connections. Emphasise how different concepts interact and feed into each other. Seeing those links is what builds a deeper grasp of the material.
• Mnemonics and visual aids. Incorporate mnemonic devices if they work for you. Personally I have a harder time remembering the mnemonics than I do the actual text. You can use diagrams and charts to aid memory retention and recall during the exam. Maybe create a pie chart of the grape varieties in a specific region, to fix the proportions of plantings in your mind that way. Visualising numerical data can work wonders on your retention, just try it out. Better even when you draw them by hand in your summary, so it sticks even more. And no, it doesn't have to be perfect, saying this loudly inside my head to myself repeatedly.

For example: what I liked to do when discussing "vineyard work" on the D1 exam is to write out all the main jobs that need doing across the year in the vineyard down one side of the page, and on the other side note the specific vineyard hazards you might meet at that time. So, to give an example: in March, during bud break (the seasonal moment), you can run into spring frosts that damage the young shoots (the hazard). I also liked to note the possible solutions to fight spring frost, which can be several things, but using smudge pots to heat the vineyard is one of them (the solution). This way I "see a vineyard" throughout the year and know instantly what hazards and possible solutions there are. So when a question comes up about, let's say, Véraison, I instantly know a few facts. Bearing in mind we are talking Northern Hemisphere here, but you also have your calendar for the Southern Hemisphere wine growing regions.

What to Leave Out

• Excessive detail. Leave out the minor, peripheral stuff that does not move your understanding of the main concepts forward. Focus on distilling the essence. For example, don't mention that there are bars on every corner in town serving that special wine because it is the region's pride.
• Repetition. Cut redundant information and repeated explanations to keep the summary clean and clear. So when you already know how red wine is made, only note the facts that deviate from the usual pattern, like extensive oak ageing, or drying the grapes.
• Jargon and complex terminology. Simplify technical language without losing accuracy, and use plain words wherever you can. Write things down in your own words. By "jargon and complex terminology" I don't mean the terms you do need to know and understand as part of a winemaking process, I mean all the "in between" words. Make sure you understand the subject in your own words, and bring in the jargon only when it is needed.

Four Techniques That Do the Work

• Active reading. Engage with the text as you go: highlight key points, jot notes, ask questions. Actively processing the material is what makes summarising possible.
• Paraphrasing. Put complex ideas into your own words to lock in understanding and internalise the material. It also condenses the information while keeping you clear of plagiarism.
• Chunking. Break the text into manageable chunks or sections and summarise each part on its own. It stops you feeling swamped and keeps the whole thing systematic.
• Review and revision. Keep coming back to your summaries to sharpen them and check they are accurate. Repetition is what reinforces the memory and makes the understanding stick.

Let me give you a few big tips for when you start refining your summaries.

• Leave a few blank lines between every topic, so you have room to refine, adjust and add things when you revise.
• Use Post-it notes to add or adjust extra information.
• Use the Cornell method of note-taking. I love this method, I use it myself, because it lets me actively engage with my own summaries while I am writing and studying them. I ask myself questions, or I leave questions for my instructor to help me with, or something I want to look up further to fully understand the topic at hand. Want the full walkthrough? Read my article on Taking Notes Like a Pro, through the Cornell method.
• Don't be tempted to start typing your summaries on your laptop just because it gives you easy access to "more room" for notes. Let me explain why, below.

Handwritten vs Digital Summaries

Digital tools are convenient and fast, no argument. But handwritten summaries have real advantages, and this is not just me being sentimental about pens. A 2023 EEG study at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology found that writing by hand produces far more widespread brain connectivity than typing, in exactly the regions tied to memory and learning. And Mueller and Oppenheimer's well-known 2014 study found that students who wrote their notes by hand understood the material better than those who typed it out word for word. If you want to read up on it, the sources are at the end.

• Better memory encoding. Handwriting engages more of the brain than typing, which supports stronger encoding and retention. Your hand cannot keep pace with the input, so it forces you to filter and reword instead of transcribing on autopilot, and that filtering is where the learning happens.
• Room for personalisation. Writing by hand lets you add visual cues, doodles and annotations in the margin, all of which help comprehension and recall.
• Fewer distractions. A pen and paper don't ping, buzz or open a browser tab. Handwriting keeps you focused on the summary in front of you.

Practice Your Bad Handwriting

Some of us are blessed with beautiful, readable handwriting. The rest of us are not. And here is the sting: an examiner can dock marks, or dismiss an answer entirely, when they simply cannot read what you have written. That would be an utter shame after all that studying. So if calligraphy was not one of the gifts you were handed, practising your handwriting while you summarise is a proper win-win: you drill the material and you protect yourself from losing marks to an unreadable scrawl.

Getting good at summarising will not make 600 pages of theory disappear, but it will make them yours, in a way that survives all the way to exam day. On D3, and on every other Diploma paper after it. Cut hard, keep what carries weight, put it in your own words, and write it by hand. Treat your summaries as the sharpest tool in your kit, give them a little care and a little creativity, and they pay you back when it counts. Enjoy!

Written by

Margot van Lieshout DipWSET FWS RV

Wine marketeer, sales expert with over 20 years in the trade, public speaker and international wine judge. Thousands of wines scored from Steiermark to Ningxia, and a trade she knows from the inside out. Wine with Margot is where she helps wine brands tell the stories that sell them.

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