Last night I after I posted I was made aware of a very cool feature in OS X called Summarize. It is an OS X service, so it is available in everything. It seems to take a block of text and offer a summary of it. The cool thing is that it is adjustable as to how much of the original content it snips out. To use it, hilite a block of text, then go to the services menu and choose Summarize. A window comes up with a little slider to adjust the level of summation. You can then copy/paste it or save it into a file. Pretty slick.
The above block of text summarized down into: "To use it, hilite a block of text, then go to the services menu and choose Summarize". Not bad. Oh, and I just found a knowledge base article on it.