Teacher Ariel Sacks notes two clashing trends in teaching literature:  teach whole books or excerpts.

The recent trend toward short texts seems to have come from the Common Core State Standards and accompanying standardized tests. As Peter Greene explains in a Forbes Magazine article, Common Core Testing and the Fracturing of Literature, “Both the standards and the tests are focused on ‘skills,’ with the idea that the business of reading a play or a story or any piece of text is not for the value of that text, but for the reading skills that one acquires and practices in the reading.” This limited focus on skills overlooks so much of what literature offers young people. But my issue with excerpts goes beyond the skills versus content debate, which has been going on many decades.

I question the choice to alter a novel’s form by excerpting it. This is partly on principle—the author didn’t intend for it to be read in bits. But more importantly, I believe reading excerpts puts students at a disadvantage in developing a love of reading and their skills in literary analysis.

The Whole Story Advantage

Literature is art. When we read a novel, we are reading an author’s artistic production, which was created intentionally in a specific form. The novel as a literary form asks readers to spend time living in a world and experiencing the story subjectively as it unfolds, detail by detail. Sure, the length can be prohibitive at times on a practical level; but fundamentally, the work of art begins at the beginning and ends at the end. Without the whole story, our experience is incomplete, and we really can’t know what the author is trying to convey with major gaps in our knowledge of the text.

I like to compare this to looking at a work of visual art—a painting, for example. Yes, we can study a corner of a painting, but we would almost never do so without first viewing the painting as a whole. Without seeing the whole, we miss out on the experience of the art as it was intended. And we are at a gross disadvantage in analyzing even the details we see in one corner, because we don’t know what purpose they serve in relation to the whole.

I agree with Sacks. A writer goes to great lengths to create a novel. Teaching only an excerpt does violence to the work and destroys love of literature.  Excerpting is butchery.