Difference between revisions of "Excerpt"

Revision as of 15:03, 18 October 2007

What is a handout good for

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. Beginners tend think, the moree thy underline, the more sense they will make of the whole. In the end they have a text with 90% marked passages all in different colors - and of no use at all. Once they are through with the text they have to re-read the underlined passages, and then they realise, that they do have to read the non underlined passages as well to make sense of the underlined passages.

If you read an article in a scientific journal restrict your text marks to a minimum. Ask yourself: what are the central massages and what are passages one has to quote to document these messages?

• Open your page like this one (See EEBO link for the following - write the language(s) you find convenient for later reference:

• Put the year of first publication top right,

• put your excerpt when finished (or at the end of the seminar, when you take a look through the materials you collected in a seminar from your seminar file) into a chronological file of materials you collect, so that you can later recycle work you did in one seminar in other seminars or in exams.

• Quote the title

• Give a short description of the book with notes on length and contents from title page to index. You will find that this is good information once you no longer know what kind of thing this was - it makes a lot of a difference whether it was a ten page short story or a 600 page collection of novellas (as in this case) or a drama.

• Give a short overview of the story before you go into details, so that you can make sense of the details you begin to note down.

• Take note of interesting passages - and make sure you note down page references on the left while doing so - so that you can find these passages later when you need them in a discussion or while writing your seminar paper.

• If you have to recapitulate a play, do first draw a kind of pedigree to show who is related to whom - father, son, wife, loved one (reciprocal non reciprocal) - etc. A pedigree is often the convenient sketch, draw arrows between the names where relationships are important - an arrow with a heart can thus mean loves this person, the same with arrows in two directions can mean love each other etc.

• Try to conclude (or begin) with your personal view, so that you can (when using your own excerpts later) see where your views changed.

• Write the way you yourself find it convenient - the excerpt is your personal kind of diary about what it was like to read this text.