Posts Tagged ‘keywords’

A summary is worth a thousand of words

Thursday, August 28th, 2008
 
A summary is a shortened version of the original. The main purpose of such a simplification is to highlight the major points from the genuine (much longer) subject, e.g. a text, a film or an event. The aim is to help the audience get the gist in a short period of time. (Wikipedia)
 
The way we learn, remember and quickly recall has a strong relationship to the way we are able to process information without overloading our senses.
 
If our goal in understanding information is to quickly extract and convey meaning, then the use of summaries is essential. Summaries can be the key to understanding and reducing complex information to indispensable facts.
 
We can say that summaries are the bare models of thoughts and that summarized information represents the authorʼs best goals and intentions.

The act of instantly summarizing a web page can be an accelerator to quick understanding. By seeing the keywords in context, we, the readers, can quickly understand, connect and retain new information.

 
Summarization is relevant to all information workers, irrespective of their expertise. When we read, we always have to parse the text. We read and re-read to extract the main statements. We underline important ideas and arguments according to the main statement. We work hard to assemble all the pertinent facts in logical order. And once all of this is done we then check if the summary reflects the original conclusions.
 
All of these hard and time consuming tasks can be greatly facilitated with the use of Context Organizer. With the click of a button, the essential keywords, sentences and context are revealed and highlighted. The keywords serve as a back-of-the-book index to the key statements and facts.
  
You may think about the Context Organizer summaries as an instant help in making sense by focusing on the key facts and conclusions only.
 
Context Organizer summaries allow busy professionals to save time.  It helps them to daily sift through copious amounts of information and rapidly review, compare and analyze information.
 
 
You can download and try out Context Organizer for free.
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Scanning and Skimming instead of Reading

Monday, August 11th, 2008
 
Literally, at a click of the button in the web browser, Context Organizer instantly identifies the keywords and key sentences by relevance.
 
There are different methods of reading for different purposes.
 
The technique we choose depends on the reason for reading; for example, we can read for pleasure, for information, or to complete an assignment.
 
If we are appraising or reviewing, we may just skim a document. If we are searching for specific facts, we may scan for particular keywords. To get detailed information, we need to dig deeper into the text.
 
In effect, we adjust our reading speed and our focus depending on our purposes.
 
Some consider skimming and scanning search techniques rather than reading strategies. However, when reading large volumes of information, skimming and scanningmay be more practical than deep reading.
 
Usually scanning is the first thing that we do when we select a source for review. It helps answer such questions as:
·   Is source relevant to helping me find what I’m looking for?
·   Will this give me the answers I’m looking for?
·      Is there anything in this related to my interest?
In fact when we are scanning, we are zipping through the whole source, homing in on the important chunks. Scanning gives us a feel for the whole item; it works like a powerful filter and saves us time.
 
In practice, scanning is a particularly useful technique for reading web pages. For example, we scan Google search results rapidly checking for relevant keywords. We glance at the titles and summaries searching for phrases or keywords that relate to our search.
 
There is also a deeper rationale for scanning; when we scan, our minds are instantly matching the keywords with the purpose of our query. This instant contextualization is the main reason why scanning is a very effective filter for identifying the relevancy of information.
 
In my work on developing Context Organizer, we built-in automatic scanning and skimming filters. Literally, at a click of the button in the web browser, Context Organizer instantly identifies the keywords and key sentences by relevance. That means that the users instantly know if the web page is important to them and what the focal points are.
 
Jacob Nielsen provided a revealing study on How Users Read on the Web:
“People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences.”
 
You can try out Context Organizer and I would be very glad to hear from you on how it helps you with rapid scanning and reading.

  

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