How do you make your voice the strongest? By connecting sources and saying something a bit newer even if not completely new, you start to develop a strong voice that can help address your research question in a robust fashion.

Here are the three main tools to do that:

Summary:

Summary can be helpful for you to understand the source, so could be good to write on your own (as you’ve done with Reflective Annotated Bibliography entries). They can sometimes be useful within your draft, but only if an extended version of contextual information about the source is necessary. In your Rhetorical Analysis, this was sometimes true because your audience was the class and you can’t assume everyone had read/heard/viewed the same text you were analyzing.

For academic arguments, you’ll want to key in on:

• what the main argument (i.e., thesis) is
• background on the author (e.g., academic discipline)
• some sort of comment about how this source (and, thus, summary) is relevant to your own argument

Paraphrase:

Paraphrase can be helpful to capture a point from one of your sources (say, a good sentence or paragraph related to your argument) but positioning in your own voice to make for better writing or to better fit it, structurally, into the organization of your writing. Here are some tips on paraphrasing:

• Identify source and comment on source
• Cover main points in same order author does
• Have page number noted
• Put paraphrase in your own words and sentence structures. If you want to keep something in its original form, use quotation marks.
• Keep your own comments, elaborations, reactions separate from paraphrase
• Have information you need to make in-text citation
• Have a note after about where you intend to use it
• Recheck to make sure it reflects your own words and the source’s words accurately

Direct Quotes:

Good to use direct quotes when the author puts something really well that you using paraphrase instead would not put so well. To quote:

• Always, always, always introduce the quote with who it is from. E.g., Susan Sontag argues that; Theorist and critic Susan Sontag explains that…; Sontag has noted that…
• Don’t quote a lot. In MLA, it is no more than 4 lines of text. In APA, it is 40 words or less. But the general rhetorical idea here is that it is easy for a reader to get lost and stop paying attention. Too much of a quote can be hard to follow in its connection to YOUR writing.
• Always, always, always use either no punctuation or punctuation that makes sense in the context of the sentence. Follow the grammar, don’t just drop it in.

Examples

Here are some examples of direct quoting and paraphrasing (we covered summary a bit already in the Rhetorical Analysis, so check that out for review in past lesson plans and Learning Modules):

• • NO: Susan Sontag wrote extensively about photography. “And, contrary to what Weston asserts, the habit of photographic seeing–of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs–creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature” (97). Photography is about seeing the world. [No introduction to quote, just dropped in there]
  • YES: Susan Sontag argues that “the habit of photographic seeing–of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs–creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature” (97). In this paper, I want to examine a productive form of “estrangement” produced by a series of professional photographs that attempt to capture elements of global warming.
  • YES: Susan Sontag writes that professional photography is reliant on “photographic seeing,” which is a habit of “looking at reality as an array of potential photographs” (97). The history of landscape photography is a history of people who had to do research to find opportune places and times to take photographs; they had to use “photographic seeing” in many ways to find the right moment (a convergence of place and time) to do their work.
  • YES: Sontag writes about this phenomenon of the photographer being divorced from the scene: “the habit of photographic seeing–of looking at reality as an array of potential photographs–creates estrangement from, rather than union with, nature” (97). Photographers need to acknowledge how their perspective will always color how a photograph is created in a way that is necessarily unnatural.
  • YES: According to Susan Sontag, to see photographically, or to “loo[k] at reality as an array of potential photographs,” is the essential ethos of the photographer (97). This way of seeing necessarily produces “estrangement from, rather than union with, nature” (97). This estrangement can be highly productive from an artistic standpoint.
  • NO: Susan Sontag (1977) said that photography is really about reality but it is hard to get reality. [this does not really represent what is said in the original–it is way too broad]
  • YES: Susan Sontag (1977) has argued that seeing photographically is seeing the world as filled with unrealized photographs.
  • YES: Unlike other theorists of photography before her, Susan Sontag claims that photography creates a necessary divide from nature for photographers (97).

Signal Words

In the above examples, you will note some “signal words” or words that help let your readers know that you are gesturing toward another writer. I used words like “writes,” “argues,” and “claims” to do this. But, there is a really great word bank on page 175 in our textbook that has other examples.

Functions of Paraphrasing and Quoting

It can be helpful to think about the range of purposes for paraphrasing and quoting.

Establish Context. Use a source to be an example of some sort of context for your writing to matter, to be interesting, to be relevant to your audience.

Review the research on your subject. Who else has written about what you are saying and what can you quickly tell me about it?

Introduce a term or define a concept. Any term that might be central or highly important to your argument should be defined, and using a quote from an expert can be helpful to do that work. When doing this, make sure you connect the definition back to your argument.

Repeating something from an expert to support or amplify what you argue. You can use a paraphrase or direct quote from an expert to echo or further support what you say to enhance your own credibility. So, perhaps not much in the way of new information, but you amplify your point and make it last a bit longer for a reader while also showing that other people agree with you.

Highlight differences or counterarguments. It can be valuable to highlight counterarguments or people who see things a little differently. It shows that you are aware of other arguments and you have thought about them. Make sure to build in how these counterarguments either enhance your own position or provide evidence for how they don’t quite support the argument you are making.

Task

In a below comment, choose a 1-2 sentence passage from one of your sources for your paper so far. If you don’t have one, see if you can find one quickly by using a keyword from your topic, finding a source with that keyword in a search engine, and choosing a 1-2 sentence chunk. Do three things:

• Paste the full quote
• Write a paraphrase of that quote (use “signal words”!)
• Write a direct quote where the quote is introduced and commented on (use “signal words” and see examples above).

After commenting below, click on the button to continue the module: