TL;DR Next time you write something long, run it through a summarizer to see which key points make it through
Here’s a blog post about Padrino, titled ”Padrino Moving Forward“. It’s 599 words long, and talks about the future of Padrino, a nifty Web framework written in Ruby:
I think this is an important question to explore. Padrino has really come a long way since the idea started life as sinatra_more in October 2009 . The code base has filled out and most of the original functionality we intended to provide on top of Sinatra now exists in full. So in this post, I want to talk about where Padrino is going in broad strokes.
It’s not the best piece of text I’ve read, and as Alex Payne pointed out, “If ever a post needed a TL;DR”. True that.
So I did what I always do and ran this post through the OS X Summarizer service. For dramatic effect, here’s the most condensed result I got, but event the more expanded has the same focus:
Sinatra is already a tested and proven development option and we plan to continue our quest to make Sinatra development so flexible …
OS X Summarized picked up all the text that talks about … Sinatra. I can see why, these sentences feel better put together and more certain.
I’m not picking on this specific post, just using it as an example. I’ve seen this happen many times before, in posts of various sizes and different topics, quite often when there’s some uncertainty about the main topic of the post. Key points get lost in the verbiage, irrelevant topics grab all the attention, and sometimes you end up with a post that reads as if in supports of the counter argument.
This can all be fixed with editing, but you’ve got to know what you’re looking for. My tool of choice is the summarizer service, which shows you the post through the eyes of a busy, distracted reader, pretty much any one of us nowadays. It helps you figure out which key points get through to the reader, and while far from perfect, it beats publishing blurry contents.
So do yourself a favor, next time you write something that’s on the long side, run it through a summarizer to see how it reads, then edit it to make the point you want it to make.
Nathan Esquenazi