My simple take on this is that summaries are for consumption or extraction in pursuit of a task essentially extraneous to the source material. Reading the orig

My simple take on this is that summaries are for consumption or extraction in pursuit of a task essentially extraneous to the source material. Reading the original (properly) is for participating in the discourse, which entails the potential of writing a response in essentially the same medium and so continuing the discourse. Unfortunately much of our education with its emphasis on assessment leans hard on extraction and habituates us the same way. Shallow and attention seeking content online hasn’t helped at all, obviously. With universities, I always found it confusing the cognitive dissonance evinced by the attempts at signalling the importance of discourse through seminars/tutorials and Socratic methods while pretending we all weren’t reading the assessment schemes on day 1. When you read and pay attention to the original source, the extra information you get are contextual clues, biases and emphases … essentially insights into the cognitive structure behind the piece and how it might play out at more general levels or in response to future conditions. You capture more of the “thinking”, not just “the thought”, and so can adapt, continue and extend it.