Excerpt

Read and digest

Studying literature you are bound to read a lot of texts from different periods and genres, both "primary" and "secondary literature".

Underline passages? Leave little notes alongside the text?

Most of us feel compelled to underline passages while reading. Underlined passages can allow a fast second reading if they are clearly structured, e.g. with marginal notes offering information about the relevance of the respective passages. Texts with too much colouring and underlining and no further structuring will be a confusing second reading as soon as one has forgotten why one underlined these passages.

If you read an article in a scientific journal restrict your text marks to a minimum. Ask yourself: what are the central ideas and statements and what are passages one has to quote to document this message? Concentrate on passages you would quote, give indications why you would quote them in your work.

Get the information out of the text!

You cannot learn and remember everything. It is much more important to remember where you saw the information. That is why you have to get the information out of the text - into a medium you yourself organise. If you work on a topic open a file in which you gather notes telling you where you found relevant information.

If you read an article or book, create an excerpt that will help you later to trace back relevant information.

How to write a good excerpt

Identify your text

Robinson Crusoe exists in hundreds of editions - page references vary accordingly. When you begin your excerpt note what edition you used. Try to use an edition you can quote in any context - the first edition of Robinson Crusoe is available on the web, it is the perfect edition to quote. If you buy an edition rather pay a bit more to get a "critical" edition.

Quote your title according to the style sheet's advice - that will help you later to list your title in footnotes or bibliographies with simple copy and paste.

Give information on length and structure of the book you are summarising

Use the books structure to get an overview. Here some important things to look at:

Frontmatter

• Frontispiece
• Original title page information

Is the author mentioned? Are there indications of a genre: "A novel"? Are there misleading elements: "this is the true story written by Robinson Crusoe" - whilst we know that it is Defoe's work. Are these elements handled in order to mislead or simply a convention readers understand as such? What information do we get about the publisher(s)? Scandalous titles can give (openly) misleading information.

• List of Subscribers
• Dedication
• Preface
• Table of contents

Text

• How structured? (chapters? single uninterrupted text?)
• Mode of presentation (first person narrative? drama?)

Apendices

• Index etc.?
• Publisher's book advertisements?

What kind of use can readers make? Are there indications of topics?

Produce a kind of quick diary while reading the text

• While reading it is good to take quick notes - with page references. If the book has individual chapters take a short not after each chapter. In case of a drama: give indications for each scene.
• Note page references (or act and scene numbers) so that you can find information in your book.
• If there ar interesting topics you may also produce a register of interesting passages under these headings.
• After reading the entire text/drama: Try to reflect your reading.

• Give a short summary
• Note surprising moments
• In case of secondary literature: summarize the argument and comment on its consistency.

After reading the text: reconsider your reading experience

The excerpt you created while reading the text is often difficult to understand later - you talked about protagonists of the play and said what they did - a year later you might no longer remember how many characters the play had and how they related to each other. Who was in love with whom? Who was whose son? Why did these people do these things? Add a few sentences as a survey and garnish that survey with your personal thoughts. Be frank - if you did not like the text, state it. If you read it because you had to, state it.

If you read books in order to write about them, think of passages you might want to refer to in your paper, Abschlussarbeit or dissertation.

What do I do with my excerpt?

Your excerpts should help you to get a broad range of texts to refer to. Your finals will include oral examinations in which you will speak about topics of your choice and about selections of texts you want to discuss under these headings.

You can collect your excerpts with your seminar materials - which is not the best thing to do. It is most convenient if you can recycle materials, i.e. if you can use them in different and ever changing contexts.

Some people take notes on file cards they eventually put into the respective books they have in their bookshelves. Others have Aktenordner for their excerpts (and additional materials they collected). A good way to organise your excerpts in a larger file system is the chronological arrangement: Note the date of the first publication on top of the first page and allow excerpts of books of different fields you study to stand next to each other. It can be extremely interesting to see what kinds of materials were published and read at the same time - or to think whether there are centuries of which you have never read a single line.

Examples

• Excerpt of Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651). (Handwritten during my student years, used red colour when I quoted Hobbes, was, as it seems, extremely fascinated --Olaf Simons)
• Excerpt of Pierre Daniel Huet, Treatise on the History of Romances (1670) (my private excerpt in Wikipedia. You might compare this with the German Wikipedia article on the same subject [1] which is a reprint of the chapter I finally wrote in my dissertation. The comparison gives you an idea of what the excerpt was designed to good for - an idea of the distance between the excerpt and the coherent text I ultimately had to produce. --Olaf Simons)
• A whole string of excerpts of manuals on duty, in chronological order, produced while I was doing research for my dissertation, mostly transcribed from microfilm -- Anton Kirchhofer
• Samuel Madden, Memoirs of the Twentieth Century (1733) (an excerpt of the first SF-novel, produced collectively in this wiki).
• Excerpt of Thomas Holcroft, A Tale of Mystery (1802). (Printed from file, personal commentary sometimes refers to materials I had just been reading before --Olaf Simons)