Usually I disdain doing the Software Updates on my Mac / iPhone (although, the experience is far better than the process on Windows), but after updating to High Sierra 10.13.4, I was really impressed with a niche new feature: text selection summary.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of where to find it and how to use it:

1. Select multiple sentences / paragraphs of text (from a website, a document, email, etc). Then right click and enter the submenu for “Services” at the bottom.

2. After selecting “Summarize”, a program called “Summary Service” will pop up in a new window. When it first pops up, it will show the entire selection, but you can toggle the controls below.

3. Summary Size slider

 

Now if only Apple would release a text expand slider so that students can make it to the word count on their essays.