 <p>After playing around with it a bit I came to this conclusion. I changed the HTML a bit because I wanted to use the Bootstrap alert boxes.</p> <pre><code>public static string MyValidationSummary(this HtmlHelper helper, string validationMessage = "") { string retVal = ""; string errorList = ""; foreach (var key in helper.ViewData.ModelState.Keys) { retVal = ""; foreach (var err in helper.ViewData.ModelState[key].Errors) { retVal += "&lt;div class='alert alert-danger'&gt;"; retVal += "&lt;button type='button' class='close' data-dismiss='alert' aria-hidden='true'&gt;×&lt;/button&gt;"; retVal += "&lt;i class='icon-remove-sign'&gt;&lt;/i&gt;"; retVal += helper.Encode(err.ErrorMessage); retVal += "&lt;/div&gt;"; errorList += retVal; } } return errorList.ToString(); } </code></pre>