summarizing

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Do you find yourself good at summarizing things? For example if you have to give some background information so someone can answer your question, can you summarize the situation you are asking about and know the important details?

I don't find that I can summarize. I suppose if someone gave me a short paragraph and asked me to I probably could but a real-life situation...I do very badly at it. Or if it is something written but longer. I also do very badly at summarizing.

I have some difficulty doing that.

I have trouble with focus sometimes.

No, I am bad at summarizing. Either I ramble about details that others don't find relevant, or I can't put into words my thought and it comes out like word salad.

I'm good at summarizing so long as I know how much background information the audience already has. I used to do presentations at work and was able to summarize information well because I was familiar with how much everyone knew and I could hold the whole pattern of info in my head and just rattle it all off. But if I don't know the person or people I'm summarizing to, then I frequently make one of two errors: (1) I assume they somehow already know a lot of what I'm describing and then I leave people confused because I use acronyms they don't know or I jump ahead and don't fill in holes in their understanding or (2) I assume they are unfamiliar with what I'm trying to summarize (but they are already familiar) and I give a complete and detailed description of all background info and they get frustrated and complain I'm being overly detailed or that I am focused too much on the small stuff. At work I would occasionally get criticized for #2.

It's better to err on the side of assuming people have less background information than they actually have.

I can sometimes get irritated when people try to "teach me what I already know." But I also have to know that there are people who can benefit from the extra information which I don't "need."

This is a lesson which took me many years to learn.