Quoting Effectively

Quoting Effectively

From perusing your rough drafts, I can glean that most of you seem to be fairly easily integrating appropriate quotations of your source texts into your rhetorical analyses. However, I'd still recommend checking out the Purdue OWL page on quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing to make sure you making the right decisions about when to paraphrase, when to quote, and when to summarize (more on that below), as well as--for those of you who haven't yet added parenthetical citations and a works cited page to your works--the Purdue OWL page on MLA citation.

One potential weakness I did see in many of your rough drafts was a tendency to quote source material that might have been better off summarized and/or paraphrased. In most of these situations, the problem occurred because the quotation being produced did little more than identify common knowledge using words that have no intrinsic importance to a rhetorical analysis of the type you are performing in your essays. Consider the following examples:

Quotes that do nothing other than illustrate the author stating common knowledge (bad):

According to Damasio, synapses "can be strong or weak" (29).

Damasio tell us that there is "no question that Gage's personality change was caused by a circumscribed brain lesion in a specific site." (17)

Quotes that demonstrate the argument or perspective of the writing in a useful way (good):

Damasio states: "For most ethical rules and social conventions, regardless of how elevated their goal, I believe one can envision a meaningful link to simpler goals and to drives and instincts" (125).

The same quote with partial paraphrase:

Damasio argues that "no matter how elevated their goal," we can "envision a meaningful link" between most ethical rules and social conventions and simpler goals, drives, and instincts. (125). 

Quotes that function to illustrate the writing style(s) of the author (good):

Throughout the entire book he switches briefly from formal to informal in style of writing because many of his lectures were originally meant for his colleagues or the scientifically advanced community.  When he has to write formally, it’s because there is possibly no alternative way to explain a concept except to use the technical terminology. For the purposes of this book, he takes those lectures and makes numerous attempts to simplify the language to the most basic thought processes of imagination. The result is an explanation that has wordy descriptions and drawn out conceptual theories.  In utilization of two texts written by Dyson, a simple comparison of two excerpts regarding Darwin’s theory of evolution. These excerpts demonstrate the switch in style from informal wordiness to a more formal style that is more efficient and tidy. The first excerpt is the formal style taken from his article “Origins of Life”, meant for his colleagues at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. “Evolution occurs by random genetic drift only. Natural selection and Darwinian evolution belong to a later stage of development, when the island populations begin to grow and to compete with one another for nutrients. Some millions of years later, another cell separated itself from the community and became the ancestor of the archeae”(82). Compare the second excerpt of informal writing style taken from a Many Colored Glass, meant for the layperson. “Evolution could be rapid, as new chemical devices could be evolved simultaneously by cells of different kinds working in parallel and then reassembled in a single cell by horizontal gene transfer.  But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share. Its offspring became the first species of bacteria, reserving their intellectual property for their own private use” (57). When writing to the layperson as you can see, he puts bacteria in relatable story format with a scene and characters. Dyson familiar verbiage like neighbors and Bill Gates, and actions of jumping around, refusing to share their knowledge, and offspring in place of ancestors. As you can see one idea takes much longer to explain Darwin’s theory to a layman when you compare the former passage of the same theory written for his colleagues. Many of Dyson’s explanations throughout A Many Colored Glass are worded in the informal style of the former excerpt rather than the formal style of the latter excerpt.

The same passage with block quotations: