Never outsource understanding

It’s easy to generate summaries of articles, essays and research papers in a couple of clicks.

But the point of summarisation is not to possess a summary—it’s to develop understanding of the source material: its usefulness, its applicability to your areas of interests, the strengths and weaknesses of the idea.

Manual summarisation is a laborious process that forces you to think, evaluate and learn. Automatic summarisation divorces the effort from the outcome, like drinking fruit juice instead of chewing an apple.

The effort is not to be avoided.