Being able to distill information quickly and accurately is an important study skill. Academic, peer-reviewed articles provide you with an abstract, but an abstract just gives you a general idea whether the article is worth skimming or reading. An executive summary of a business report, however, is a document that—while concise—should pro-vide enough information to allow executives to act on it without necessarily having to read every word of the report. If you are asked to summarize a news article, for example, you need to provide the gist of it to the reader who then ought to be able to clearly understand the original without having to read it. As a rule of thumb, executive summaries tend to be nutshell versions, boiled down to approximately 10 per-cent, of the original. A 100-page report might result in an executive summary of up to ten pages. If the report has five sections, the executive summary needs to address each of these sections, too. Think of the executive summary as a miniature version of the original document, following the structure but leaving out details, examples, and other supporting information. Another benefit of being able to summarize skillfully is that you verify your understanding of the concepts in your reading. If you can’t summarize the original accurately from memory, in your own words, you probably need to reread it to understand it better.
Instructions
*Select a substantial news analysis or feature article in a reputable business publication, i.e., The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg Businessweek, Money, Forbes, The Financial Times, or the business sections of big U.S. dailies (e.g., The New York Times, The Washing-ton Post, or U.S. News & World Report).
*Choose an article of length and substance, at least 2,000 words long. Tip: If you access the article in a research database, a word count will be provided for you.