You will produce a summary of a long document in which every claim is traceable to a page.
At some point someone will hand you a long report and ask what it says. A supplier's annual report before a contract renewal, a government consultation paper your team needs to respond to, an industry study your manager forwarded with "thoughts?" in the subject line. An assistant can produce a summary in seconds. The question is whether you would stake your name on it.
In this exercise you will produce a one-page summary of a long document in which every point can be traced to a page, and you will check enough of those points to know how far to trust it. It brings together the lessons of this module: 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, and it takes about thirty-five minutes.
Choose a public document 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, which are usually free to download from the agency's website. Get the digital PDF, not a scan, for the reasons in lesson 5.1.
Pick something you have a reason to understand. A report on a company you have invested in, an industry you work in, or a policy that affects you will hold your attention through the checking, and you will notice when something sounds off.
Hui Min, from the earlier lessons in this module, works in procurement. She chose the most recent annual report of a Singapore-listed company her firm buys from, about ninety pages long.
Before asking for any summary, ask for the structure: "List the main sections of this report with the page range of each. Do not summarise yet." This is the plan-first move from lesson 3.2, Ask for the plan before the work, applied to reading.
Check the structure against the report's own contents page. If page ranges are off or sections are missing, you have learnt early that the assistant is not reading the whole file reliably, which tells you to work in smaller pieces. Hui Min's list matched the contents page except for two short sections near the end, which it had merged into one, so she made a note of that before going on.
Now ask for summaries one section, or a few short sections, at a time: "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." For long reports, uploading only the pages for each section, or asking about one section per message, keeps every part fully in view.
Keep the outputs together in a working document. By the end you will have far more than a page, which is fine, because you will cut it down once the checking is done.
Pick at least ten points from your working document and check each against the page it cites. Choose a mix: some figures, some statements about plans or risks, and at least two or three points you would quote if you passed the summary on. Figures and anything that sounds surprising deserve priority.
For each claim, record one of three verdicts. Correct means the page says what the summary says. Wrong means the page says something different, such as a different figure or the opposite conclusion. Unsupported means you cannot find it on the cited page or anywhere near it.
Hui Min checked twelve claims. Nine were correct. One gave revenue for the wrong financial year, because it had read the previous year's column in a table. One cited the right fact with a page number two pages off. One, a statement that the company planned to expand into Vietnam, appeared nowhere in the report, and she marked it unsupported. Those are her results, given as an example of what a check log can turn up; your counts will differ.
Step 5 is the one-page summary itself. Build the one-page summary from points you trust, with a page number on every point. Anything marked unsupported stays out, and anything marked wrong gets fixed from the page itself. You can ask the assistant to condense your checked points into a page, but give it only the checked points, and then make sure the page numbers survived the condensing.
You should have two things. The first is a one-page summary of the report, with a page reference after every point. The second is a check log of at least ten claims, each with the claim, the page cited, your verdict and a short note on any problem. Hui Min's log showed her that figures from tables were the weak spot, so on her next report she checked every figure and only a sample of the rest.
That pattern is the real output of the exercise: a sense of where your assistant slips on long documents, so you know where to look next time. Now go and find your report, and download the digital PDF from the official source.
Submit a one-page summary with page references and a check log of at least ten claims marked correct, wrong or unsupported.
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