Boil a Long Source Down Without Bending It

What it is for

A summarizer pulls out prominent sentences, not the author's argument, so summaries routinely promote a cautious finding into a flat claim. This lays out how to prepare the text, which output shape fits which job, how to judge length by what comes back rather than by a percentage, and the three questions to ask before you trust it. Use it when the summary will feed something real — a report, a literature review, a decision.

The skill Copy

Clean the input first. Menus, cookie banners, author bios and footnote markers
pasted from a web page get weighted like sentences and end up in your summary.
Paste the body text and nothing else.

Choose the output by what you will do next:
- The extractive output, which hands back the source's own sentences, when you
  need to find where the source says something and will go back to it. It
  extracts; it does not connect.
- The connected-prose output when you need something readable for your notes.
- Neither, when the source is an argument. Summarizers rank sentences by
  prominence, and the most prominent sentence in a paper is often not its
  conclusion.

Do not think about length as a percentage of the original. Ask for the shortest
summary you will actually reread, look at what comes back, and lengthen only
when something you needed is missing.

Summarize section by section for anything long. One pass over a whole paper
collapses method, results and limitations into a single flat voice — and the
limitations were the part you needed. A long source may also not fit in one
pass, which is the second reason to work section by section.

Then check the summary against the source:
- Does a hedged finding now appear as a fact? This is the most common way a
  summary lies.
- Is the conclusion the author's conclusion, or the loudest sentence in the
  introduction?
- Did sample size, time frame or scope get dropped? Put them back by hand.

Keep the link and the page or section number beside every summary you save. A
summary with no route back to the source is not evidence, and in a month you
will not remember which paper it came from.

Never summarize a source you have not opened. You cannot notice what is missing
from a summary of something you never read.

How to install it Copy

1. Open the tool and start a new conversation, project or template.
2. Paste the text below wherever the tool keeps standing instructions
   — usually called system prompt, instructions, or persona.
3. Save it so it applies to every run rather than a single message.

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Where it came from