Touched up this handout on integrating quotations:
If your college instructor wants you to cite every fact or opinion you find in an outside source, how do you make room for your own opinion?
Paraphrase. You can introduce studies that agree with you (Smith 123; Jones and Chin 123) and those that disagree with you (Mohan and Corbett 200) without interrupting your own argument. (Note how efficiently I did that — the parenthetical citations are designed to preserve the flow of ideas in the sentences that refer to outside ideas.)
- Quote Selectively. If you must use the original author’s language, work a few words from the outside source into a sentence you wrote yourself. (If you can’t supply at least as many words of your own analysis of and rebuttal to the quoted passage, then you are probably padding.)
- Avoid Summary. If you must quote several lines of another author’s language, don’t interrupt the flow of your own argument in order to summarize the material you have just quoted. (Generally speaking, summarizing someone else’s ideas is one of the easiest ways to churn out words; while students often turn to summary when they want to boost their word count, paragraphs that merely summarize are not as intellectually engaging, and therefore not worth as many points, as paragraphs that analyze, synthesize, and evaluate. See “Writing that Demonstrates Thinking Ability.”)
Similar:
The Decline of Wikipedia: Even As More People Than Ever Rely on It, Fewer People Create It
I'm getting ready to introduce my freshm...
Cyberculture
An Opt Out Letter That Speaks to All Parents
One household notifies the authorities t...
Culture
International Studies Association proposes to bar editors from blogging
“I think it’s a really strange propo...
Academia
Take my feedback if you want to pass.
As my students in a compressed online co...
Academia
Because Internet: the new linguistics of informal English
I'm planning to begin my online Shakespe...
Culture
Making Connections in Virtual One-Shots
I often invite my colleague Kelly Clever...
Academia
Paraphrase. You can introduce studies that agree with you (Smith 123; Jones and Chin 123) and those that disagree with you (Mohan and Corbett 200) without interrupting your own argument. (Note how efficiently I did that — the parenthetical citations are designed to preserve the flow of ideas in the sentences that refer to outside ideas.)

