A technique for compressing texts such that referential integrity, sentence coherency, punctuation and readability are preserved and which provides for compression of sentence constituents based on the type of content, the informativity of the sentence constituent and the grammatical readability of the resultant sentence or phrase. Information content portions are parsed to generate parts of speech tags. The informativity of the constituents in a phrase or sentence is determined and the parts of speech having lower information content and having a low effect on grammatical readability of the phrase or sentence are selectively compressed. Parts of speech having successively higher informativity and low effect on grammatical readability are selected for compression until the desired level of compression is reached. Compressed portions are indicated in the summary with a selectable placeholder which expands to display the compressed text.