How do you spell consise?

Regardless of what my mother says, I was never a good writer. Actually, she'll tell you that I never was a good writer, and has no idea when I became a good one. I'm still working on an answer to that, and quite frankly don't see the same thing as her. One of my biggest problems with writing is brevity (fancy word for someone who doesn't write well). I've never been great at getting to the point when I write, and usually my editing process involves taking three sentences and making them into one.

In a great bout of irony, my current job involves writing. A LOT of writing. This week I have been working on an educational document that will be given to scientists to explain to them how to write the executive summary of a business plan. Among the things that are so wrong with this assignment - I'm writing a educational document that explains how to incorrectly do something. The executive summary is supposed to be done last! (or at least after you've fleshed out all of your ideas and are more than halfway done..)

That said, I find myself writing not only how to write the summary of a document that doesn't exist, but what you should have included in that document, and why it was important to include it. I have all of the concepts written and fleshed out. At this point I'm taking them and putting them into the format that I finally decided on. That in itself took a few hours.

So today I was working on this document. After roughly 7 hours and more than 2,100 words later (5 pages), I was finished with the section that explains how to write the financial information that should be included in an executive summary. By the way, the financial section of an executive summary averages about TWO paragraphs in length.

Now, while the information I've included is (to me) relevant and important, something tells me my bosses were expecting something much more concise in nature. So now, while I want to show them this section to make sure that it's what they were expecting, I also want to try to shorten it. I just can't figure out what isn't important.