Writing content that survives being summarised
When a page is compressed into two sentences, the specifics survive and the hedges vanish. Writing that survives summarisation states the condition alongside the answer, so that removing the surrounding text cannot make the remaining part false.
There is a specific, avoidable failure where an assistant reads your page and produces a summary that is confidently wrong — and the fault is genuinely in the writing. It happens when the qualification lives somewhere the compression drops.
The failure, concretely
A page says: "Migrations take four to six weeks." Two paragraphs later it says: "That assumes a single-language site under a thousand URLs; multilingual estates take considerably longer." A person reads both. A summariser takes the first sentence, because it is the direct answer, and produces "migrations take four to six weeks" as a fact about all migrations.
The page was correct. The summary is not. And the reader who acts on the summary and is wrong will attribute it to you, because your name is beside it.
Any sentence that can be lifted alone will eventually be lifted alone. Write it accordingly.
The rule that fixes almost all of it
Attach the condition to the sentence carrying the answer. Not the paragraph. The sentence.
| Breaks under summarisation | Survives it |
|---|---|
| Migrations take four to six weeks. (…two paragraphs later…) This assumes a single-language site. | A single-language migration under a thousand URLs takes four to six weeks; multilingual estates typically take three months or more. |
| We work with companies across Europe. (…later…) Our delivery languages are Dutch, English and German. | We deliver in Dutch, English and German, for clients across Europe. |
| The scan is free. (…later…) Publishing requires a paid plan. | The scan is free; publishing answers requires a paid plan. |
What else gets lost in compression
- Irony and rhetorical questions. A summariser reads them literally and reports the opposite of what you meant.
- Anything carried by a table's context. State the unit and the scope in the cell or the caption, not only in the prose above it.
- Sequence dependence. "The second option" is meaningless once lifted; name the option.
- Negations that arrive late. "This is what everybody believes. It is wrong." is two sentences that separate badly.
- Figures without their basis. A number with no scope attached will be repeated with a scope somebody else assumed.
The edit pass that catches it
Read the page and mark every sentence that states a fact somebody could act on. Take each one out of the page, on its own, and ask whether it is still true with no other context. Where it is not, move the condition into the sentence. It takes twenty minutes on a long page and it is the single highest-value editorial pass available for this medium.
Questions this settles
It means the load-bearing sentences have to be self-contained. The rest of the page can be as good as you can make it; voice lives in the connective writing, not in the sentence stating the figure.
Paste the URL into the assistants your buyers use and ask for a two-sentence summary. What comes back is close to what a person asking about your subject will be shown.
No. Move it, so that the nuance travels with the statement instead of sitting in a paragraph that gets dropped.