What is the process of providing a brief statement that expresses the major points or themes?

The process of providing a brief statement that expresses the major points or themes is best described as summarising. When you summarise something, you distill the main ideas and essential details from a larger piece of text, focusing on the core themes without extraneous information. This skill is crucial in both academic settings and everyday life, as it allows individuals to communicate the essence of a topic effectively.

Condensing typically refers to reducing the length of a text without necessarily focusing on the thematic content, while simplifying involves making information easier to understand, which may not capture all the significant points. Outlining, on the other hand, involves structuring and organizing the main ideas into a format that highlights relationships between them, rather than providing a concise summary. Thus, summarising encapsulates the essence of distilling information down to its major points or themes.