Extracting

Today we learned about how to extract from written media and the importance of it. To extract it means to take out the key points of a piece of text, such as an article or a review and so on. You do this by skim reading the work, and then going back and either highlighting or underlining (whatever suits you) the parts you find important. Something is worth highlighting if its a key point in which you could expand on or if it's some kind of evidence to help back up any points you're planning on making. It is then important that you take these extracted points and write them up in your own words; no one want's to read a copy of something already wrote, so you must take what you've learnt and write it in a way that makes sense to you.

Extracting is important because it allows us to define the facts worth knowing - you don't want to waste your time reading things that aren't necessarily important. Also, when working in media you'll be asked to 'pitch' ideas, meaning you'd need a lot of background information on whatever you are talking about. So to do so, you'll do research, from that you wont just read back the things you found out, you'd put it in your own words and make your own points.

Today, we were given a newspaper or magazine and then we had to find an article we found interesting. We read the article, then went back and skim read it whilst highlighting the key points. After this we rewrote up the article using what we extracted and in our own words. We then stuck the article and our new version of it on a piece of paper to make a poster.