An excerpt is a short section taken from a longer piece of writing, music, or film. When your teacher asks you to read an excerpt from a novel, you're reading just a few pages or a chapter, not the whole book. When a movie trailer shows exciting scenes, it's showing excerpts from the full film.

A newspaper might print an excerpt from a politician's speech to show readers the most important part. A music teacher might have students practice a difficult excerpt from a longer symphony.

Excerpts serve many purposes. Sometimes they give you a taste of something to help you decide if you want to experience the whole thing. Other times they highlight the most important or interesting part. When you're writing a book report and include a few sentences from the story to prove your point, you're using an excerpt as evidence. The key is that an excerpt is always part of something larger, carefully chosen to represent or illuminate the whole.