(0) Above is Plato’s Phaedrus in under 500 words. On MS Word’s account.
(1) I’ve been reading a metric tonne of Plato lately.
(2) I remember clicking a button in Microsoft Word once that shrunk my friend’s poem into a very satisfying koan.
(3) I spent two hours on the internet trying to find that button in my current version of Word.
(4) It’s called AutoSummary.
(5) Is this a procedural writing? I think so. Microsoft Word has to use some sort of algorithm to decide on what they think is “most important.”
(6) I inputted all the text of Plato’s Phaedrus.
(7) Ran AutoSummary at 25%.
(8) Took that and ran AutoSummary again so it popped out under 500 words.
(9) Was rather tickled at the results after being disappointed.
(10) Am going to remove the dialogue tags and run it again and see what comes out the other end one more time.

UPDATE: I took Socrates’s speech and did a 25% AutoSummary, then did a 1% AutoSummary on top of that and this is what came out after I took out the dialogue tags.

After a little bit more googling, turns out that some years after I found this out by accident, some RISD dude made a thing of it. Awesome.