How to Summarize an Article in One Post

A one-post summary of an article needs three things: the article's main claim in your own words, the single detail that makes it concrete, and a credit to the source with the link. Everything else is optional. If you can fit those into roughly 250 characters, you have room left for the link and a little air.

The hard part is the first item. Most articles make one central claim and spend the rest of their length supporting it, qualifying it or telling a story around it. Your job is to find that claim and say it in one sentence.

Read it once, then close the tab

Read the whole article before you write anything. Then close it, or scroll away, and try to say what it was about out loud in one breath. Whatever you say first is usually close to the main claim. If you can't do it, you haven't understood the piece yet, and no amount of trimming will fix that.

Writing from memory also stops you copying the article's phrasing, which tends to run long. Reporters write for people who have already clicked. You're writing for people deciding whether to click.

Once you have your one-breath version, go back and check it against the text. Did the article really say "doubled," or did it say "rose by about half"? Did the study find a cause, or a link? This check is where most summaries go wrong, and it takes a minute.

Find the claim, then the proof

News articles put the claim in the first paragraph or two. Feature stories and essays often hide it in the middle, after an anecdote. Reports and studies put it in the abstract or the "key findings" box. A good test: the main claim is the sentence the headline is trying to compress.

Then find one piece of proof. This is the detail a skeptical reader would want: a number, a date, a named source, a before-and-after. "The city's new bus lanes cut commute times" is a claim. "The city's new bus lanes cut average commute times by 9 minutes" is a claim a reader can weigh.

Pick one detail, not three. A post with three statistics reads like a spreadsheet, and readers remember none of them.

Write it short, then cut it shorter

Draft the sentence without worrying about length. Then cut in this order:

1. Throat-clearing at the start: "New research shows that", "According to a new report", "It turns out". The source credit goes elsewhere.
2. Qualifiers that don't change the meaning, such as "very", "really" or "significantly" when there's already a number.
3. Long names that have a short form your readers know.
4. Clauses that explain how the information was gathered, unless the method is the story.

Don't cut the hedges that carry meaning. "In mice", "in a small trial", "proposed" and "so far" are short and they're often the most important words in the post. Our guide on avoiding misleading summaries has more on which words you can't drop.

Credit the source and leave room for the link

Name the outlet or author in the post itself, not only in the link preview. Previews don't always load, screenshots strip them, and a name tells readers whose claim it is. "Per Reuters" or "via @handle" costs about a dozen characters.

On X, any link counts as 23 characters no matter how long it really is, and you need a space before it. So the rule of thumb is to keep your text at 256 characters or less if the link goes at the end. TweetSum does this math for you when the link option is on, including the weighted counting for emoji and non-Latin scripts.

If the article is paywalled, say so. A short "(paywall)" saves readers a frustrating click and earns some trust.

A worked example

Say the article is a 1,400-word local news story about a library that opened a monthly repair café funded by a state grant. The opening paragraph has the who, what and when. Halfway down there's a figure from a pilot: 212 of 290 items fixed.

A first draft might read:

New article from the Riverside Gazette explains that the Riverside Public Library is going to start running a free repair café on the first Saturday of every month beginning in March, funded by a state grant, and that a pilot fixed most items.

That's about 240 characters before the link, and it buries the best detail. Cut the throat-clearing, swap the vague "most items" for the number and move the credit to the end:

Riverside's library will run a free repair café the first Saturday of every month from March. In a pilot, volunteers fixed 212 of 290 items people brought in. (Riverside Gazette) [link]

It's shorter, it has a fact a reader can check, and it says whose reporting it is. That's the whole method.

Using a summarizer as a first pass

Extractive tools like TweetSum are useful for the "find the claim" step, especially with long or dense pieces. They rank sentences by how many of the article's recurring words they contain and where they appear, which tends to surface the lead and the key finding. The sentence map on the summarizer page shows every sentence's score, so you can see what the article keeps coming back to.

Treat the output as a draft. An extract reuses the article's own sentences, so it can pick a line that only makes sense next to the one before it, or a quote that belongs to the wrong side of a debate. Read the result against the article, fix what's off, and put it in your own words where you can.

A short checklist before you post

• Could someone who reads only your post repeat the main claim correctly?
• Is the number in your post the same number, with the same unit, as in the article?
• Did you keep every hedge that changes the meaning?
• Is the source named in the text, not only in the preview?
• Does the post fit with the link, counted at 23?

If all five are yes, post it.

Questions