Content is King, But Who Has Time to Read it All?
With all the writing I do comes hours of associated research. While this is usually enjoyable, time is of the essence, and it's important to have a few shortcuts to help wade through all the PDFs, articles and brochures I read daily.
For years I've used a product called Copernic Summarizer, which actually goes beyond the summarizing capabilities within Word. It can summarize any web page or file, and creates a handy list of key terms at the left hand side of the summary, which I can scan, and it highlights terms that interest me throughout the document. Summarizer is great for getting a quick gist of a long PDF, and great for collecting key phrases from a document when I am researching an industry I'm not familiar with.
While I'm on the "less is more" theme, it's fun to see how much can be said in as few words as possible. Wired has a great "Six Words" article that features various celebrities and their pithy comments. Check out some of these gems: "It’s behind you! Hurry before it" - Rockne S. O’Bannon; "Failed SAT. Lost scholarship. Invented rocket." - William Shatner; and my favorite: "Steve ignores editor's word limit and..."- Steven Meretzky