One of my most valuable lessons in communications came from a graduate course in philosophy. Each week we had to read the major writing of a medieval philosopher. These were weighty tomes, sometimes running to a thousand or more pages. And each week we had to write a two page paper that summarized the work.
I would start by writing fifteen or twenty pages, then cut those pages down to ten, then reduce those to five, until I finally succeeded in writing two pages that captured the core ideas. In the process of reading I had absorbed much. It was in the process of reflecting and writing that I truly began to comprehend. And it was in the process of distillation – of choosing what to leave in and what to leave out – that I actually learned something that made an impact. That process of absorption, comprehension, distillation was time-consuming and difficult, but it taught me an incredibly important skill that I have continued to hone, practice and rely upon all my life. I learned how to render the fat out of a bloated body of words and ideas, how to untangle a jumble of facts and opinions, how to extract from too much information something meaningful and memorable.