Summarize a presentation to one idea: one take-home message per presentation. Both listeners and speakers will benefit from this strategy. A listener summarizes two entrepreneurship lectures into two sentences: "Networking to death" and "Your IP-strategy is your business plan", which helps the listener grasp the main idea of the two presentations. On the other hand, the speaker will deliver the information more efficiently and effectively when his/her materials are organized around one center idea.
Summarizing to one idea is also useful in reading a book. Taking notes while reading seems to be a good practice but requires too much time in copying. On contrary, summarizing each paragraph, each section, each chapter, and each book will reduce the amount of words taken down and, at the same time, facilitate the understanding of main ideas in these composition units and form a wholistic view of how one idea relates to another.
