These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
When you cite sources in your text, you have two issues to contend with.
The first is inserting quotes and paraphrases into your text in an organic way that doesn't interrupt the "flow" of your argument & that seems to really fit with what you're trying to do.
The second is using proper parenthetical citations for those sources...but we're not going to worry about that one today.
When you listen to radio or TV news or read the newspaper or read scholarly journals for your other classes or read our textbook, pay attention to how people introduce their sources.
Here's an example how Glassner might use a quote (although I'm playing with his text here) in his first chapter:
There were some wild claims about the extent of PC oppression on college classes. "Most English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare can qualifiy as an appropriate author." And journalists found this quote to be too juicy to resist.
But here's how Glassner incorporates that quote into his text and blends it with his own words:
When Robert Brustein, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre, picked up on NAS rhetoric and proclaimed that "most English departments are now held so completely hostage to fashionable political and theoretical agendas that it is unlikely Shakespeare can qualifiy as an appropriate author," journalists found the quote too juicy to resist.
In the second example, the quote isn't just plopped into the middle of the paragraph without any connection to the main argument. In addition, we get some information about the person who uttered that quote and what that person's credentials are.
Look at this one:
College students use facebook to network and socialize. "I'm on Facebook like six times a day" (Myers 18). But Myers and his peers may not be aware of the future consequences of some of the materials they post in these online sites. "Facebook pages never go away, like every web site, they're preserved forever" (Grady 4). College officials are trying to get this message out to seniors in particular. "They need to recognize that their future employer may take a look at their facebook page, so cleaning these sites out before they enter the world of business is just common sense" (Burns 38).
It's both a little choppy and it doesn't tell me who is speaking these quotes. The source is cited in the parenthethesis, but in order for me to see why I should bother to believe/trust/listen to those sources, I have to go to the Works Cited page.
This one tells me who is talking and blends their quotes with the rest of the paragraph:
College students use facebook to network and socialize. Tom Myers, a senior at Oakland University, suggested that he visited Facebook at least "six times a day" (18). But Myers and his peers may not be aware of the future consequences of their facebook pages. Phyllis Grady, president of Harvard University notes that "facebook pages never go away, like every web site, they're preserved forever" (4). Grady and others are targeting this message to their seniors in particular. College students "need to recognize that their future employer may take a look at their facebook page, Monty Burns of Oberline University points out, "so cleaning these sites out before they enter the world of business is just common sense" (38).
When you listen to the news, you hear a story & then you hear something like "Joe Smith is founder of the blah, blah organization and he's been working with this blah, blah for over 20 years, and he reports that" -- camera goes to Joe Smith speaking. This isn't a bad model to follow when you're introducing material from your sources...the first time you do that, you'll want to find some way to signal to the reader who that source is and, presumably, why they're a credible source for you to use in your research papers.
Quote Sandwiches (always yummy):
Top bun: introduces the topic related to the quote/paraphrase and/or introduces the person speaking
Yummy center: the quote or paraphrase (blended with your own words)
Bottom bun: restating the quote, explaining its significance to your topic or claim, connecting that quote to another idea, refuting that quote, providing an example that supports that quote, etc.
So your paraphrases and quotes shouldn't just drop out of the sky into the middle of your paragraphs; instead, they should be worked organically into your argument...seem like a part of your paper, even though these things have been spoken by someone else who deserves full credit for that quote, paraphrase, or idea.
These course materials
are licensed by Lori Ostergaard under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.