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 (philo