An English lesson from the makers of the Open Text Summarizer (OTS), regarding comprehensive prose and easy summarization for the purpose of conciseness.

1) While it may seem counterproductive to be overly verbose in writing something to be concise, agressive avoidance of unclear pronoun references[1] results in more readable summaries produced by OTS and similar products.  Additionally, unless the content of your document itself is poorly arranged, the prolific use of antecedents in place of pronouns will not make your full document less readable, instead it will often be more readable.  Why?  The number of mental computations required to parse and comprehend a given structure (STRUX) is fewer.  Such computations include STRUX alignment and cross-linking references and antecedents within the logical layout of the STRUX, followed by the actual dereferencing of pronouns.
2) Vocublarly consistency and limitation.  
3) Regarding the length of sentences and parallelism.
4) Tips and tricks of OTS
   4.a) Foot- margin- and endnote referencing
   4.b) Acronyms
5) Where grammar and readability seem to conflict
   5.a) Language exists to facilitate communication and grammar exists to keep language consistent.
   5.b) Part-of-speech in parallelism is subordinate to consistent vocabulary.
6) Don't go off on a tangent, because your summary will be perfectly representative of your paper, and your paper is less less representative of your intended subject.
7) Slightly isolate lists such as examples from the rest of the sentence structure using colons and 'such as' 'for example' and so on, in order for ots to leave that out, "This mostly applies to content involving parallelism, such as lists of examples, arrays of data, and lists of people with something in common" becomes "This mostly applies to content involving parallelism."  "Cats have funny names, for example fido, scruffy, and kit" becomes "Cats have funny names."  With the addition of a part-of-speech parser such as links (the sentence parser) includes, you can get more advanced with ots' interpretation, such as being able to recognize which comma-delimited elements in "Cats have funny names, fido, scruffy, and kit for example" are vital, and producing the exact same summary.  "The data is sorted to make [fido kit scruffy]" becomes "The data is sorted."  "The authors all had a background in physics, including Martin Sevior, Richard Weidner, and Robert Sells" becomes "The authors all had a background in physics."  Cool, huh?

Note: This document will soon be modified to be more akin to prose, and to more completely correspond to the suggestions herein.  Naturally a fringe benefit of doc and code improvements being the ability to create a seemingly perfect summary of this very document.  Cool, huh?

MORE IMPORTANT NOTE: Points 1 and 7 are relatively complete, the rest I just jotted down a brief reference so I dont forget and can come back to it and elaborate in the next few days.  Many of these points, once elaborated upon, reference features of ots that actually dont exist yet.  I'm working on that, see TODO-mg.

Feel free to contact me at the email address in the top of TODO-mg.

Have fun, write well, and publish often -Mark Gilbert
