Mastering how to write an excerpt can turbocharge your academic writing.
After sifting through all the online databases and looking for papers, you’re often left with a daunting pile of references.
Some of these are dense giants, packed with complex ideas that seem impenetrable at first glance.
Fear not! In this article, I will show you how to efficiently break down those texts, pulling out the golden nuggets of information, arguments, and key passages essential for your own essay or thesis.
At the end of the article, I will provide you with a ready-to-use table template, which will help you navigate through your literature review and make your academic writing so much easier.
#1 What Is an Excerpt?
The term “excerpt” originates from Latin and means “extract.” In a figurative sense, you are pulling all the important information from the text you wish to excerpt.
However, an excerpt is not limited to information alone. Depending on your intention, you can also extract argumentation patterns, specific linguistic features, or other elements you are looking for.
The goal is always the systematic simplification and summary of the original text.
You can write excerpts from factual texts, newspaper articles, and even Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. Typically, however, this technique is applied in the context of academic literature. For this reason, we will stick to this example in this tutorial.
#2 Why Should You Write an Excerpt?
From my perspective, writing an excerpt has three advantages.
#1 Overview
By excerpting the central texts underlying your academic work, you can take an abstract look at these works. You understand the differences between authors, how views and definitions vary. You can juxtapose and contrast the original sources to argue more effectively.
Especially when writing a literature review, a selection of excerpts can provide the necessary depth to make it outstanding. Often, I see literature reviews that only scratch the surface. They simply string together summaries of single studies, which is NOT what you want to do in a good literature review.
But if you have produced rich excerpts, you can interconnect the references and independently argue how this literature forms the basis for your academic work.
#2 Understanding
Another obvious advantage of excerpts is the increased understanding of the text. If you are faced with challenging foundational literature written decades ago by the giants of your research discipline, these are often not easy to digest.
An excerpt breaks down a text and reveals its central statements. What remained hidden to you through passive reading is now visible.
Thus, during the text production of your own work, you will have much less trouble using your own words and, moreover, you can eloquently talk and discuss the texts at any time.
#3 Cataloguing
Writing excerpts also helps to make your selection of literature searchable and readily available. Imagine creating your own little database.
You will likely not write just one academic paper during your studies.
With a catalogue of excerpts that continuously grows, you can access an ever-increasing treasure trove of knowledge with each paper you read.
#3 Excerpting with a Table
The excerpting technique I recommend involves using a table. This table ensures that your excerpts are standardized, which later helps in retrieving them more easily.
Additionally, the table serves as a guide for the steps you need to take to write a complete excerpt.
Digital or Analog?
Before we proceed to the table, you need to make an important decision. Do you want to excerpt using pen and paper, or would you prefer to go digital?
If you’ve been following my channel for a while, you’ll know that I favor the digital approach. Handwritten excerpts cannot be automatically searched, and you cannot easily copy and paste text from the excerpt into your paper.
Moreover, you’ll know that I strongly recommend using literature management software. If you use software like Zotero, for example, you can also manage your excerpts with it, keeping everything in one place.
Furthermore, if you want the ability to work on your academic papers from anywhere in the world, then the digital option is superior to the handwritten one.
But this decision is entirely up to you.
The Excerpt Table
For the actual technique, it doesn’t matter whether you proceed digitally or analog. The table I recommend works for both approaches.
And this is what it looks like:
If you’d like to save yourself a few seconds of work, you can download the excerpting table in Word format here:
#4 In 4 Steps to a Complete Excerpt
Now we start with the actual excerpting process, which I have divided into 4 steps.
#1 Understand the Context
Read the text in its entirety first.
If you read a research paper, you can skim through the parts that are not relevant to you right now.
The goal is to get a complete picture of the without being interrupted too often. Here, you can roughly estimate into how many and what kind of thought sections the text is divided. Often, paragraphs and subheadings can also be of help.
#2 Set Goals
Before you can write your excerpt, you need to be clear about what you are looking for. It may be that your text is only relevant in a few places for you and your academic work. This could be because you are investigating a highly focused research question that only requires certain parts of the source as a basis.
Here are a few example questions an excerpt can answer for you:
- How is term X defined?
- What is the author’s stance on topic Y?
- What is the current state of research on topic Z?
Questions, direct quotes, information – what are you looking for? Sometimes you pick up a text because you are looking for a definition of a term. In other cases, it’s because you want to understand a complicated scientific theory.
Therefore, always create your excerpts with your intention in mind and not aimlessly.
#3 Write the Excerpt
Now you fill out the table. Let’s do this with a simple example. For your academic work, you are looking for a definition of the term “Fake News.”
On the far left, you enter the scientific source you are consulting.
Then, enter the topic in the second column. In the third column, you now collect text passages. This approach is best suited here, since you would most likely incorporate a definition as a direct quote into your work.
In the rightmost column, you have space for notes that are important for you and your work. Here, I often write down ideas and problems that come to mind while reading.
This is how your excerpting table could look:
#4 Summarize
If you had another goal, for example, regarding understanding, then you could also summarize important passages from your source in your own words in the third column.
Feel free to extract both from the texts, i.e., text passages suitable for direct quotes and summaries in your own words.
Both will assist you later in paraphrasing when you are in the process of text production. Here you can find more on the topic of paraphrasing.
As you work your way down in your table, you can stay with the same text and define a new goal. Instead of “Fake News Definition,” you could now open a new topic like “Fake News on Facebook.”
If the text has served its purpose and was only helpful for the definition, then start the next line in your table with a new paper or book.
Here, it could be about “Fake News Definition” again or something entirely different.
However, in the grand scheme, it might make sense for you to create individual excerpt tables for different topics. If you want to go through 20, 30, or more references, then a single table can quickly become cluttered.