The more I’ve learned about information science, effective information behaviors, the organization of information, information literacy, and the research process, I realize that the common thing uniting all of these things is summarization.

In short, the key skill for making sense of the world of information is developing the ability to concisely and precisely summarize some body of information in your own words.

Trying to replace this learning process with automated tools is the antithesis of intelligence—the value in summarization is not the produced summary as an artifact, but is rather in the act itself of creating the summary.

Scott P. Johnson