Who Says? Holdstein & Aquiline, Chapter 7 Use of resources 1

Conversation with your resources Don’t let the resources “take over.” That can result in what they call “patchwriting”—just patching together a string of quotes [On the other hand, don’t go off on tangents or personal opinion—this is still a research paper, so the sources must make your argument.] 2

Summarizing To write a good summary, you need to show that you understood the source you were able to select what is important in each resource 3

Paraphrasing This is more detailed than summarizing; it is your main task in your use of the sources One key skill is to avoid “patchwriting” The other is to make your paraphrases differ enough from the original text [as we showed with handouts] Recall that you should change the language but also the order of the ideas, i.e. the sentence structure. Don’t just drop a synonym in every few words as you follow along [They paraphrase their own text as an example, although the in-text citation, in MLA style, is incorrect (page # is 91, not 101] 4

Quoting Don’t use too many quotes—again, paraphrasing shows your ethos as a writer, it’s the style of most academic writing (as opposed to journalism), and it avoids the appearance of padding. Use direct quotes (with “ ”) when the language in the quote is as important as the idea being quoted Frame the quote with an introduction/attribution before it and a restatement of its relevance afterward ( the “quote sandwich”) ICE: Introduce the quote with a signal phrase (e.g. According to Jones, (2015); Smith (2014) argues that). Cite it. Explain it. 5

Choosing among the three When details aren’t important, summarize. [Papers about the Internet can tend to be overly technical] Use quotes rarely—when interesting things are said in an interesting way by interesting people Aim for quotes that are at least one sentence [not the partial quote with [his or her] they show on p. 94]; but typically no more than three sentences [For APA style, use blockquotes if more than 40 words (or about 5 lines)—indent left margin, put citation at end, no quotation marks] 6