A useful summary preserves conditions that change a decision.

Fictional notice: “The library’s main room will close on Tuesday for maintenance. Book returns remain available at reception from 10 am to 2 pm. Room bookings will move to Wednesday only if their organisers confirm availability. Digital lending is unchanged.”

Your reader has a Tuesday booking. Identify the information they need before summarising: closure, the condition for moving and the outstanding action. Simply saying everything moves to Wednesday is insufficient.

Reusable instruction: “Summarise the notice for someone with a booking. Separate changes, unchanged services and what requires confirmation. Preserve conditions. After each point, identify the supporting sentence. Add no missing hours or procedures.”

Ask for brevity after setting those requirements. If the limit is very short, check that it has not removed a condition needed to interpret the message.

The summary should state that the room closes on Tuesday and moving requires availability confirmation. It should treat book returns and digital lending as separate services with their respective conditions.

Mark “Your booking has moved to Wednesday” as incorrect: the notice does not confirm that change for a specific person. Also flag any address, contact or confirmation deadline absent from the original.

Keep supporting passages in an internal note. For a shorter final message, retain a link to the original and manually check conditions before removing evidence from the draft.

For a long document, list sections first and check that the summary covers more than the opening. This exercise does not establish that a tool has read material you have not supplied.