Response, Reuse, Rewrite

In the first two chapters of "Rewriting" by Joseph Harris, we learn how to respond to other authors work. At least once everyone has disagreed with something they've read, writing a paper on something you don't like can easily turn into a paper full of complaints with little credibility. By not summarizing but describing the authors "aims and strategies," we can seem knowledgable enough of the topic to accurately form an opinion against it. The main points I saw were, 1) don't summarize and 2) don't use too many quotes.
Summarizing is basically the same as copying the authors paper and using too many quotes is having the author do all the work for you. Instead, when picking which thing to quote we ask, "What aspects of the text stand out for me as a reader?" To avoid summarizing we express what we understood from the readings. To write credibly we don't say one thing is good and one's bad we use two positives the example in the book is "generous and assertive."
I think what Joseph Harris is saying the purpose of rewriting is, is to show an understanding of what we read and also add our own spin on it. To rewrite something, we use it for our own purposes. If we're using it for our own purpose, it wouldn't do us any good to copy someone else's work.
Blogging is about writing our own opinion about anything and everything, rewriting is about writing our own opinion about something we read. I see a connection between the two in the sense that both of them are super easy to plagiarize, in a blog you can just easily just reword someone else's post as you can plagiarize an essay, but that's not the point of either of them. Neither of them would benefit anyone if it was just a copy of someone else's work. It's all about bringing our personality and ideas on a topic.