Mass_Driver comments on How to Live on 24 Hours a Day - Less Wrong

15 Post author: Mass_Driver 04 December 2010 09:12AM

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Comment author: Mass_Driver 04 December 2010 07:21:55PM 9 points [-]

Wow! Are you usually this good at summarizing? What else have you summarized? It would have taken me hours to do this. Are there techniques I can learn?

Comment author: MixedNuts 04 December 2010 09:11:28PM 20 points [-]

Aw, shucks.

This did take me hours, but I would have had to do the same culling for ideas if just reading - the writing bit didn't take that long.

But I cheated. When you summarize, you leave out some info - e.g. leave a conclusion but remove the arguments, reduce a list of examples to one. You give about equal space to equally important points. You gloss over bits of context. You group several related ideas into one.

Here I explicitly avoided doing any of that; I just removed the parts that made me think "We get it, you're snarky, now shut the hell up about Mecca and get to the point!". I summarized the part about elasticity, but that's it. Summaries are about length; this was about density.

I can't think of a public summary I have written. I've summarized books and excerpts thereof for school, that kind of thing. My school prepared us for a summarizing exam (this exists). School told me at was good at it, so I probably am. AFAICT, I'm good at summarizing ideas and books, bad with movies, and terrible with my own ideas.

Tips (insert disclaimers):

  • See above for what summaries do.
  • Omit needless words. Useful in general, and easiest to apply. Twitter's great for practice.
  • When you find an idea, rephrase it. This ensures you understand.
  • Try to group fragments into vaguer main ideas. Others rate them for importance and keep the best; I can't.
  • There's generally one idea per paragraph. Calibrate your idea-finder.
  • Nuke local repetition (possibly local nuance), keep spaced repetition.
  • Focus on causality relationships, especially with events or fiction. This is why I'm better at books than movies; scenes that affect atmosphere but not plot are less salient to me in books.
  • Be laxer with examples.

The crucial part is the idea-finder, but I didn't learn and can't teach it. Summarizing for school (about a page into 150 words) taught me to omit needless words, but little else as the original texts tend to be garbage. To fake it, find keywords (philosophy jargon) and feed them as atomic tokens rather than rephrasable concepts to the idea-finder. This may help as practice, no idea.

They say "writing is rewriting", but I have to rewrite on the fly or get anchored. YMMV.

Comment author: quintopia 08 June 2012 11:59:45PM 1 point [-]

The crucial part is the idea-finder, but I didn't learn and can't teach it.

I have access to a pile of books to teach this to kids, and have used them. It's the number one skill that children doing poorly in reading comprehension must be taught. One of my favorite exercises related to this is. "Here's a paragraph. Find the sentence that is not on topic." Usually the sentence does seem tangentially related to the topic, but once you can concisely put in words the purpose every other sentence has been bent toward, it stands out like a sore thumb.

It's not fun, exactly, but studying SAT/ACT reading comprehension problems also helps on this front. There's probably five or more questions on every SAT/ACT that only ask "what is the main idea of this passage?"

Comment author: jscn 09 December 2010 08:08:53PM 0 points [-]

MixedNuts's comment reminded me of a good resource for such techniques, and, indeed, for generally improving one's effectiveness at reading: How To Read A Book

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