Doug Never Says Anything

and with this utility, you can get to the point quicker!

The web resource Summarity is “Software that Summarizes”.  The premise is pretty simple.  Select some text, paste it to Summarity and let it do its thing.

Its thing is to analyse your content and summarize it to save you reading the entire content.  So, I decided to put it to the test.  I went back to my blog post about my first look at the Apple iOS 4.2, copied all of the text, pasted it into the entry box and asked Summarity to summarize it for me.  The result?

That’s kind of cool.  Plus, once you do get a summary, you can adjust the shrinkage factor to give more verbose or shorter results.  Ever looking for the educational angle, I turn to literacy and one of the important concepts is having students learn to summarize a piece of reading.  Using Summarity might well be an engaging hook to compare a computer generated summary with one that’s done manually.

But, there’s another component to this resource that I find even more helpful.  It’s called Skim Mode.  With Skim Mode, it’s like a computer generated highlighter where the Summarity highlights by making the phrases that it deems important become bold.

This feature, I find really interesting.  Just like the process of reading text and identifying the salient points, you can focus on the highlights, but also still read about it to put the reading in context.

So, if you’re a regular reader of this blog and want me to get to the point — just summarize my entry and get to it!