Document-Level Summarization

      In creating each summary you should keep in mind the following
scenario for its use. Imagine that to save time, rather than read
through a set of complete documents, you first read a list of very
short summaries of those documents and based on these summaries you
choose which documents to read in their entirety. Create your very
short summaries to be useful in such a scenario.

      A very short (~10-word) summary could look like a newspaper
headline, it could be a list of important terms or phrases separated
by commas, or it could be a sentence, etc. It should not contain any
formatting; i.e., no indented lists, etc.

Topic-Level Summarization

      Once you have completed the 10-word summaries for each of the
documents (130 in all, for this phase), you will create a 100-word
topic-level summary. Click on "Topic-Level" in the summarizer
tool. All ten documents will be listed in one file. Read through the
documents, then begin typing the 100-word summary, or synopsis, of
each document set. The final product will look like a dense, 4- to
5-sentence-long paragraph. Again, no formatting should be used. When
you finish each topic-level summary, SAVE the file and move on to the
next topic.