Contents4
Sufficient consensus
Extractive summarization selects sentences from a source text and assembles them into a shorter version. It feeds snippets, previews and answer boxes.
Selection is driven by position, salience and overlap with the query.
What the result pages leave out
These belong to the subject. People ask about them. They are missing from the agreed coverage.
- Qualification disappears first. Conditions, exceptions and the word usually are the parts most likely to be dropped, and they are often the parts that make the statement true.
- The first sentence carries disproportionate weight. Openings written as warm-up get promoted to the summary.
- Contradiction inside one page. Two sentences from different sections can be assembled into a claim the author never made.
- Nothing is attributed. A summarized claim arrives without the evidence that supported it, and is judged as an assertion.
- Writing to be summarized. Putting the complete claim in one sentence per section is the practical response, and it changes how you write.
What people actually want to know
- What would a three-sentence summary of my page actually say?
- Which of my qualifications survive being cut?
- Does my opening sentence contain a claim, or a throat-clearing?
- Could two of my sentences together be read as something I did not mean?
Write each section so that its first sentence is the section. Everything else is support that may or may not travel.