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A summary is essentially a quick snapshot of a story's narrative. It gives a broad view of the story without going into depth, only bothering to cover the main points without providing much in the way of context, character, setting, or other details. One could read the summary of a story and see what happens in the narrative but still not understand why these things happen, because a summary skips the specifics.
A plot is much more detailed, covering the five stages of plot development: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. When breaking down a story in this way, one gets a fuller idea of how the narrative works and why events in a story progress in the way that they do.
Using Romeo and Juliet as an example, a summary of the play's plot would cover the main events. It would share that two teenagers...
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from rival families fall in love, marry in secret, and then kill themselves when bad circumstances, misunderstandings, and violence force them apart. This is a broad view of the story's events, not a very detailed one.
A plot synopsis would share how the story progresses to its tragic end in detail. The reader would see the exposition (Romeo and Juliet are from rival families whose members regularly fight in the streets of Verona, leading to civil unrest), rising action (Romeo and Juliet fall in love and marry in secret despite their familial conflict), climax (Romeo kills Juliet's cousin Tybalt after witnessing the murder of his friend Mercutio at Tybalt's hands, leading to Romeo's banishment from Verona), falling action (with Friar Lawrence's help, Juliet tries faking her own death so Romeo can come to claim her from the Capulet tomb, but the message does not reach Romeo, who comes to believe Juliet is dead, leading to his suicide, then Juliet's), and resolution (the two penitent, grieving families reconcile after witnessing the love and deaths of their respective heirs). Here, the reader gets so much more information and better understands how all of these elements fit together.
The summary of a novel is a review of the important events that happened. This includes the events of the story’s plot. When someone says the “plot” of a novel as opposed to the summary of a novel, it could be that this refers to an explication of the plot, also known as a story grammar.
A story’s plot consists of five elements. These are the exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. These are terms we use for analyzing the structure of the story. They are often plotted on a graphic that looks like a line graph, starting out straight, then going up, coming to a point, going down, and then going flat again. Each section of the graph represents one of these parts of the plot.
The exposition is the beginning of the story. This is where the story’s characters, setting, and inciting incident are introduced. The events that follow are called the rising action. This is where the story develops. The rising action leads to the climax, which is the turning point of the story and usually the most dramatic part. From the climax to the resolution is the falling action. This is where the story is being wrapped up. The resolution is the story’s ending.
A summary is used to review the basic events of the plot. It will include the main characters and describe the setting. The most important events that happen in the story will then be briefly described.