Not every part of a sentence is equally important. When you are prereading/skimming text you need to understand what you are looking for. Is it an event, a definition or a feel? Accordingly you can easily summarize long texts into 1/4 of their original length. The summary words will form the basis of your markers. Occasionally the important words can be selected by simple grammatic analysis.
Take an informative news line:
“Four people, including a young girl, have been killed after a car exploded on a roundabout in Sweden’s second city of Gothenburg, police say.”
First remove auxiliary sentences. Usually, they can be skimmed. “Four people have been killed after a car exploded on a roundabout in Sweden.”
We start with verbs. “killed after exploded”. This explains the basic plot.
Notice I always add adverbs, and negations when considering verbs. This small words may change everything.
Now add nouns. “Four killed after car exploded in Sweden”.
Do not add adjectives, but keep prepositions.
Basically, this summarizes what most of us should remember after reading.
Feel free to choose if you want the rest of the text, or you are good with 1/4 of what you just read. This qualifies for 70% retention.
To get 90% retention you do need to remember the auxiliary sentences.
Now let us take a simple textbook sentences:
“When something creates a problem, the performance or the status quo of the situation drops. Problem solving deals with finding out what caused the problem and then figuring out ways to fix the problem.”
Notice that now verbs can be dropped. “create, drop, deal, finding, figuring, to fix” do not generate meaning.
Focus on rare nouns: “problem situation cause ways”. “Causes and ways to deal with problem situations” will qualify for 70% retention, and again this is 1/4 of the sentences.
Finally consider a food review:
“We had an amazing evening for two couples. Night kitchen has the right combination between amazing food, and a fun and warm atmosphere. I would also say the value for money is very good. We tried different dishes and enjoyed all, personally I really liked the nookie”.
We need to judge how good it was. So the focus would be on adjectives: “amazing right fun warm good different”. No need to understand what exactly happened there. “amazing fun and warm” would summarize the experience.
The Pareto principle suggests that 80% of the meaning of the text is focused in 20% of the words. Find the right words in each sentence and everything else falls in place. Verbs, nouns and adjectives – each may play a different role in the way we remember texts.
