Slash and trash
The ‘Slash and trash’ technique is a useful way to put your research on a topic into your own words. Here’s how it works:
1. Read about your topic. In this example, we’re using a passage from the website Wikipedia.
Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, England, best known for being the ‘plague village’ that chose to isolate itself when the plague was discovered there in August
1665, rather than let the infection spread. The plague had been brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth that was delivered to tailor George Viccars from London.
Within a week he was dead and was buried on 7 September 1665. After the initial deaths, the townspeople introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness from May 1666. Perhaps the best-known decision was to quarantine the entire village to prevent further spread of the disease. The plague raged in the village for 16 months and it is stated that it killed at least 260 villagers with only 83 villagers surviving out of a population of 350.
When the first outsiders visited Eyam a year later, they found that fewer than a quarter of the village had survived the plague. Survival appeared random, as many plague survivors had close contact with the bacterium but never caught the disease.
Abridged from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyam#Plague_history
2. Now go through the passage and slash (highlight) the key points and trash
(delete) any words you do not need.
Eyam is a small village in Derbyshire, England, best known for being the “plague village” that chose to isolate itself when the plague was discovered there in August
1665, rather than let the infection spread. The plague had been brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth that was delivered to tailor George Viccars from London .
Within a week he was dead and was buried on 7 September 1665.
After the initial deaths, the townspeople introduced a number of precautions to slow the spread of the illness from May 1666. Perhaps the best-known decision was to quarantine the entire village to prevent further spread of the disease. The plague raged in the village for 16 months and it is stated that it killed at least 260 villagers with only 83 villagers surviving out of a population of 350.
When the first outsiders visited Eyam a year later, they found that less than a quarter of the village had survived the plague. Survival appeared random, as many plague survivors had close contact with the bacterium but never caught the disease.
© www.teachit.co.uk 2011 14177 Page 1 of 2

Slash and trash
3. Present the words you have rescued as bullet points:
 Eyam
 Derbyshire, England
 ‘plague village’
 isolate
 August 1665
… and so on.
4. Write this up in your own words without looking at the original.
Eyam is a town in Derbyshire, England known as the ‘plague village’. It is a place which isolated itself in August 1665 when the plague was brought there to stop the disease from spreading. It is suspected that the plague was brought to the village in a flea-infested bundle of cloth.
The townspeople introduced a number of precautions. The plague raged throughout the entire village for 16 months and killed at least 260 villagers with only 83 villagers surviving.
When people came into the village a year later, they discovered that fewer than a quarter of the village had survived the plague. Survival seemed random and some of them had come into close contact with the disease but never caught it.
5. Try out the slash and trash technique on the following text about
Shakespeare:
William Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564; died 23 April 1616) was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist.
He is often called England's national poet and the ‘Bard of Avon’.
His surviving works consist of about 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. His plays have been translated into every major living language and are performed more often than those of any other playwright.
Shakespeare was born and raised in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18, he married Anne Hathaway, with whom he had three children: Susanna, and twins
Hamnet and Judith. Between 1585 and 1592, he began a successful career in London as an actor, writer, and part owner of a playing company called the Lord
Chamberlain's Men. He appears to have retired to Stratford around 1613, where he died three years later. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and there has been considerable speculation about such matters as his physical appearance, sexuality, religious beliefs, and whether the works attributed to him were written by others. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare
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