You will be able to write a summary of a long document in which every claim can be traced to a page.
When you summarise a long document with an AI assistant, ask for a page number after every point, then check at least ten of those points against the pages they cite. The checking tells you how far you can trust the summary, and over time it shows you where your assistant tends to slip on long documents.
This comes up at work more often than you might expect. You might face a supplier's annual report before a contract renewal, a government consultation paper your team must respond to, or an industry study a manager forwards with "thoughts?" in the subject line. An assistant can summarise any of these in seconds, so the question is whether you would stake your name on that summary, and the checking below is how you answer it.
This exercise is the capstone of the module. It brings together lesson 5.1 on how files are read, lesson 5.2 on quotes and page numbers, and lesson 5.3 on working in batches and checking what matters. Allow about thirty-five minutes. You will finish with a one-page summary of a long public report with a page reference after every point, and a check log, which is a record of at least ten claims, each with the claim, the page cited, the verdict and a short note on any problem.
Pick a public report of thirty pages or more, so that no confidential material is involved. A listed company's annual report works well, as does a government publication such as a ministry's annual report or a statutory board's guide. Government publications are usually free to download from the agency's website. Download the digital PDF from the official source rather than a scan, for the reasons given in lesson 5.1.
Choose a subject you have a reason to understand, such as a company you have invested in, an industry you work in, or a policy that affects you. A subject like that holds your attention through the checking and makes it easier to notice when something in the summary sounds off.
Hui Min, who works in procurement and appears in the earlier lessons of this module, chose the most recent annual report of a Singapore-listed company her firm buys from, which was about ninety pages long.
Ask for the structure before you ask for any summary. This is the plan-first move from lesson 3.2, "Ask for the plan before the work", applied to reading. A prompt that works is "List the main sections of this report with the page range of each. Do not summarise yet."
Check the result against the report's own contents page. If the page ranges are off or sections are missing, the assistant is not reading the whole file reliably, and you should work in smaller pieces for the rest of the exercise.
Hui Min's structure matched the contents page except that two short sections near the end had been merged into one, and she noted this before going on to the summaries.
Summarise one section, or a few short sections, at a time. For a long report, either upload only the pages for each section or ask about one section per message, so that every part stays fully in view. A prompt might read: "Summarise the section on pages 12 to 25 in five bullet points. After each point, give the page number it comes from. If a point draws on more than one page, give each page."
Keep every output together in one working document, the place where all your section-by-section summaries sit before they are cut down. It will run to well over a page, which is fine because you cut it down to one page after checking.
Choose at least ten claims from your working document and check each one against the page it cites. Mix figures, statements about plans or risks, and at least two or three points you would quote if you passed the summary on. Check figures and anything that sounds surprising first. Give each claim one of three verdicts:
Correct: the page says what the summary says. Wrong: the page says something different, such as a different figure or the opposite conclusion. Unsupported: the claim cannot be found on the cited page or anywhere near it.
Hui Min checked twelve claims, and nine of them were correct. One gave revenue for the wrong financial year, because the assistant had read the previous year's column in a table. One cited the right fact but gave a page number two pages off. One said the company planned to expand into Vietnam, which appeared nowhere in the report, so she marked it unsupported, bringing her total to 9 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 12 claims.
Record each entry in your check log as you go: the claim, the page cited, your verdict, and a short note on any problem, such as "read the previous year's column" or "page number two pages off".
Build your one-page summary from trusted points only, with a page number after every point. Leave unsupported points out, and fix wrong points from the page itself. If you want the assistant to condense your checked points into a page, give it only the checked points, then confirm the page numbers survived the condensing.
Then read your check log for patterns. The real output of the exercise is a sense of where your assistant slips on long documents, so you know where to look next time. Hui Min's log showed that figures taken from tables were the weak spot, so on her next report she checked every figure and only a sample of everything else.
Now go and find your report, and download the digital PDF from the official source.
Hand in a one-page summary with page references, plus a log of at least ten claims you checked, each marked correct, wrong or unsupported.
Junxiong-WFG Organisation is an authorised representative of AIA Financial Advisers Private Limited (Reg. No. 201715016G).