Be able to integrate their ideas with others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources.
Writing not only revolves around understanding outside sources but being able to bring this understanding directly into an essay is a crucial step. Over the course of the semester, this is something I have made great improvements with. There are many factors that have contributed to my growth in this aspect of writing, one, in particular, was learning how to properly frame quotations.
Before ENG 110, I had only written a handful of essays where I was required to directly insert quotes so I was not very good at it. I would just throw a random idea together, find a quote that matches up best, and move on. I was also notorious for dropping “hit-and-run” quotations talked about in the book “They say, I say”, basically meaning I would insert a quote and provide little to no background or analysis as to why it was important to what I was writing. After reading this and thinking about the way I do this in my own writing, learning how to use a “quote sandwich” to properly introduce and explain my sources has done a lot for me. This is a framing technique that works for including quotations from other authors to support your own ideas and/or claims in an essay. It consists of three parts: introducing the ideas that the quote is going to support, the quote itself and the MLA citation, and the explanation of how this supports my own ideas or claim in my essay. Recognizing these three critical parts of including an outside source in my own writing has prevented these “hit-and-run” quotations, and helped me support my claims.
Another improvement that I have made when it comes to using source material is being able to adequately explain my own interpretation of a writer’s work, taking this analysis, and branching off of it. This is something that I have struggled with for a long time. In my writing from the beginning of the semester, you can notice areas where I would just take an idea one way for a sentence or two but never really come back to it. As the semester moved forward I became better at outlining essays so that I could not only use concepts that are discussed in the outside sources I needed to include but be able to clearly insert my own voice and tie it to what the whole essay is about. The paragraph below (Figure 1.) demonstrates my ability to integrate these growths which I have made over the semester.
In the paragraph shown above, I have highlighted each different section showing where I used source material, included analysis of the writer’s thoughts, and added my own ideas on the concepts I discussed in my essay. The first section is my own voice tying together ideas I wrote about in the preceding paragraph. The second section is where I introduced David Foster Wallace, an outside source who I did not mention in my intro paragraph with the other main authors that the information in the essay derived from. It is just a short sentence of summary about his speech I used in my paper. Not only was this bit of summary necessary to establish some knowledge for an outside reader, but it is the first part of a quote sandwich. The third section is the second part of the quote sandwich, the actual quote from Walter. The fourth section, the final part of the quote sandwich, brings the ideas from the first part together. I also used this sentence to bring Biss’s ideas together with Wallace’s. The fifth section is my own analysis of Biss’s style of writing and how it relates to concepts from Wallace’s speech. The sixth section is my own voice in the paragraph through the analysis of Biss’s writing, and the seventh highlighted section is a quote I chose to back my writing up. The next section is the third part of my quote sandwich here, explaining my understanding of the quote and how it relates to the ideas I discussed when setting up the quote. The final section is a sentence of my voice, bringing everything I talked about in the paragraph towards an idea that I present throughout my entire essay.
