ability to summarize literature through the years

In high school, I was always taught to summarize any literature used for a research paper. However that is easier said than done. Throught the years of high school, I found that my ability to correctly summarize literature improved. During my sophomore year english course, I would say that my ability to cite sources belonged inbetween "patchwriting" and "paraphrasing". It was hard to further develop a certain writer's ideas and paraphrase the context in my own words. Fast forwarding to my freshman year in college, I feel like my ability to comprehend and summarize literature has greatly improved. Through core writing classes, I have written many research papers that force me to find academic sources and summarize ideas and themes in my own words. Now that I am reaching the end of my first year at a university, I feel like my analyzing and summarizing ability belongs to the "summary" category. I can confidently say that I am able to write a research paper without copying or partialy paraphrasing an author's work.