Summarising a long document

Summarize the document below for {{audience}}, whose goal in reading this
summary is: {{purpose}}.

Structure:
1. One sentence: what is this document, and what does it want the reader
   to do or decide?
2. 3-5 bullet points of the specific facts or arguments {{audience}} would
   actually need to act on {{purpose}} - not a compressed retelling of
   every section.
3. Anything the document is notably vague, hedged, or silent about, if
   that gap matters for {{purpose}}.
4. If the document makes a recommendation or asks for a decision, state it
   explicitly and note any conditions attached to it.

Skip anything from the document that doesn't serve {{purpose}}, even if
it was a major section - a good summary for a specific reader is not the
same as a shorter version of the whole thing.

Document:
{{document}}

When to use

A long spec, a vendor contract, a research paper, a legal document, or any long document where you need to act on it rather than just know it exists. Especially useful when several people need different summaries of the same document for different purposes - run it once per audience/purpose pair.

Why it works

A generic summary tries to compress every section proportionally, which means the two sentences that actually matter to your specific decision get buried among a dozen that don’t. Naming the audience and purpose up front lets the model prioritize by relevance to the actual decision instead of by the document’s own structure. Explicitly asking what’s vague or missing catches the common case where the important information isn’t what the document says, but what it carefully avoids committing to.

Variations

• Add “Compare this against our current approach: {{current state}}” if the summary needs to support a build-vs-adopt or renew-vs-switch decision.
• For a very long document, first ask for just the table of contents with a one-line description of each section, then ask to expand only the sections relevant to {{purpose}}.
• Ask for the summary as talking points for a meeting instead of prose, if it’ll be presented rather than read.