[jerf]

At this point, I explicitly call my "second draft" a "word removal pass". That's most of what happens. If I were ever to write fiction, I'd also write myself a text editor customized to some of my own bad habits, like, it would syntax-highlight all adverbs. I use them a lot in first draft writing but most of them should be removed.

As a sibling to your comment says, I have often unashamedly included an "executive summary". They seem to appreciate it. I also rather frequently pull them off the email chain when I'm diving into technical details, unless they explicitly ask to stay up-to-date on the entire chain. Then, if I want to re-update them, I'll add them back in, so they get the whole chain in one shot if they really want to dig and I'm not "hiding" anything, but they still get their summary.

Upshot, don't be scared to put "executive summaries" in. It's not sarcasm and it's not a joke.

[loughnane]

I use Vale and it’s syntax highlighting plugin for sublime text to do just this.

I have it open all day use it to compose anything more than a few sentences long.