The activity of summarization relates discourse comprehension and production in a particularly striking way: it derives writing from reading, in that the rendering of a text depends on its previous interpretation. There are two very different kinds of summaries including: abbreviated versions and brief accounts. An abbreviated version is the product of a language exercise, operating on the level of the language system by changing structures. A brief account is the product of a social activity, operating on the level of language use by interpreting the propositional meaning and the writer's intention and reformulating it for a different reader. An empirical study of English summaries by Austrian university students indicates how different degrees of contextualization, or schematic priming, influenced the amount of processing the students performed on the original text. Lack of priming, such as a missing title, tended to lead students to produce brief accounts rather than just abbreviated versions. The findings have implications not only for instruction in summarization, particularly in the differentiation of specific summarization tasks, but also for translation. (Author/MSE)