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. Beginners feel especially safe while underlining. In the end they have a text with 90% marked passages, often in different colors - and regularly 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 passages they did not underline to make sense of all the underlined passages. A text without the coloured passages would be easier to read...

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? An article of 25 pages might contain three or four underlined passages - because you would not quote more if you had to substantiate a summary of the authors position.

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.

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

It makes a difference whether it was a 50 page story or an 800 page novel - your excerpt of a 50 page story can touch the plot briefly and concentrate on interesting observations - you can re-read the text every time. A Drama or an 800 page novel is something different. State how many pages it has, give a note on the structure. Maybe make copy of the table of contents.

If you read (a reproduction of) an original book with an interest to see what kind of book this originally was (on EEBO or ECCO) note details about the format the publication.

• What information did the title page give? (Our modern editions of Robinson Crusoe offer "Daniel Defoe" as the author and often a label like "literature" or "fiction", "a novel" - the original editions played an entirely different game. Take a copy of the original title page if you can).
• What additional information did the dedication or preface provide (many older texts had these additions).

Produce a kind of quick diary while reading the text

While reading it is good to take quick notes - with page references: What happens on these pages, what has happened in the chapter you have just read? in the act or the scene of your play? Taking notes is the only way you make sure you somehow digested the text. Take a piece of paper, note page numbers (act or scene references) on the left and take notes referring to these page numbers.

If you are reading a scientific book take notes of steps the author took - is there a point he/she tries to make? How is it proved.

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 disseration.

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 kind 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

We will offer some exemplary excerpts over the next days. --Olaf Simons 20:12, 23 October 2007 (CEST)