Summary Is Decided by Whether You Give a "Template"
Send only "please summarize" and AI returns a bland short text. For the same material, specifying target, use, reader, and granularity produces a summary you can actually use, like a different thing. This article explains concretely what "template" to ask for in three typical cases: long text, PDF, and minutes.
Long-Text Summary: Shrink in 2 Stages
For long text over ~10,000 characters, 2 stages is more stable than summarizing all at once.
- Summarize each chapter/section in 200–500 chars
- Gather those and have it produce a final 800–1,500-char summary
As of 2026 the main AIs handle ~1M tokens at once, so a single pass is enough for short materials. Still, 2 stages lowers the risk of "missing the first half" in long materials and makes chapter granularity easier to align.
Summarize the following chapter in 300 chars.
- Keep important numbers/proper nouns
- State the author's claim and evidence
- Don't add your own interpretation
[body]PDF: Accuracy Changes with How You Hand It Over
The main 2026 AIs are multimodal, so attaching the PDF directly is the easiest. Only when scan quality is poor or layout is complex does pre-converting to text with a dedicated extraction tool (text extraction like pdftotext, Adobe's extraction, an OCR service) stabilize things.
When you'll use tables/items downstream, extracting as JSON while keeping structure makes it easier to handle.
