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Writing With Substance: You Can Haz it! SRSLY!

Reading and Writing: Assignment 6

In this assignment, you'll work on an important skill: integrating what you read into what you write.

Some folks (including but not limited to the authors of They Say / I Say) refer to this skill as making a "quote sandwich." You can find an instructive slideshow here, for instance, that uses that metaphor (though be advised that the slides focus primarily on how to integrate quotations from literary works). I personally like to avoid the phrase "top bun," so I'll give you a generic formula for integrating quotations that works much the same way.

First, introduce the quotation with a verb that attributes it to a noun, usually a person or a text from which the quoted material derives, or a phrase that highlights attribution such as "according to":

According to John Davis,

As John Davis argues,

John Davis contends that

You can add to these very brief clauses (what I'll call "attributive tags" from here on out) with additional information if you see fit. For instance, you might add more information about where John Davis's argument appears by using a prepositional phrase: "In an essay on student privacy in Education Survey, John Davies argues..." Sometimes this information is useful for readers to have up front; in other cases, however, you may find that providing it isn't wholly necessary as long as you've properly cited the essay in your Works Cited page. In fact, I'd advise you to think carefully about what the information adds to your prose, since including it can run the risk of overloading your sentences; sentences that contain quotations can be more challenging to read and process than those that contain a single writer's prose. At all times, you must be mindful of your readers' needs. (If you're working with that quote sandwich metaphor, think of that extra information as additional items on the sandwich. Sometimes those items enhance the digestion. Sometimes they end up falling on the plate.)

Second, add in the quotation you want to use, with an eye towards its role in your written work and its grammatical construction in the original context. Is it a complete sentence on its own? Is it a phrase or clause that is incomplete once you remove it from the place it holds in what you've been reading? Your introduction and what you do next will both hinge on the grammar of your quotation. We'll discuss your options and obligations to your sources in more detail in class; for now, I'll simply add quick descriptions of your third and fourth step in the process, offering commentary on the quotation itself that elucidates for readers what the quoted material means and why you're including it, and then adding a parenthetical citation prior to the punctuation (usually) in MLA Documentation Style that matches the entry you'll have in your Works Cited Page.

By "commentary" I don't mean that you need to "translate" the quotation or repeat it; instead, you need to emphasize the implications of that material for your particular needs in a particular piece of writing. Again, we'll talk much more about what I mean here in person; your efforts before our meeting will ensure we have a useful starting point for our work.

In the assignment articulated below, I want to see what you already know about integrating quotations by asking you to incorporate direct quotations from material we've read into your prose; you must attempt to do so without introducing grammatical or mechanical errors.

Review the reading you completed for Assignment 1.
Review any assigned reading on your syllabus from outside of this book as well the quotations you recorded for Assignment 3 and Assignment 5.
Now write a short Narrative Bibliography in the spirit of Ta-Nehisi Coates' "Home is Where the Hatred Is" that describes how your understanding of data and privacy has been informed by what we've read. You may paraphrase and summarize what you've read in places, but remember that even paraphrases require citations because they, too, are the intellectual property of another writer. You must also use at least four direct quotations (total) in your narrative, drawing them from any of the assigned readings you've completed on the subject (but remember your best sources may indeed be the scholarly sources that you read in academic journals!). You may also include and discuss any notes you took on the film, Terms and Conditions May Apply, and your notes from class discussions.
Save your draft to your university Google docs or desktop so that it will be accessible to you in our classroom. Then upload it as well to the submission link for Assignment 6 on Blackboard. You will be revising this document in class, but you must have a full draft uploaded/completed prior to our meeting to be eligible for full credit.
At the bottom of your document, add any specific questions you have about punctuation or anything else related to quotations that come up as you attempt to write your Narrative Bibliography.

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Reading and Writing Assignment 9 8 Review of History & Literature (Subject Overview Essay) plain 2014-10-09T17:10:19-07:00
For this Assignment (one of three major papers for this course) is linked to the research you will conduct on your chosen topic for Assignment 10: you will write an overview of the history and existing scholarship on it. This kind of overview is an important part of any substantive academic project; accordingly, this assignment gives you an opportunity to learn more about the library and online databases so that you will be comfortable using these resources throughout your academic career. It will also give you practice at producing academic prose; in particular, this paper requires you to improve your ability to integrate source materials––through summary, paraphrase and direct quotations––into a discussion of a topic. This skill will be invaluable as you take more advanced coursework in college.
The mode of this paper will be similar to the "Narrative Bibliography" you read for Reading and Writing Assignment 1 and wrote for Assignment 6. It should be more formal in style than your previous attempt for Assignment 6; though you may use the first-person pronouns "I" and "we," you should frame your discussion as an overview of existing work rather than as an account of your own journey through the topic.

After conducting preliminary research on the topic you have chosen for your final paper for this course, you will discuss what you've learned about the available research. You will start the writing process by taking good notes on what you read and then doing some basic free writing. What elements of your sources are worth discussing? For each source, consider the following:
The argument an author makes
The trajectory of the author’s argument
The structure of the study (introductory matter? Specific chapters?)
The various kinds of research a study includes. What kinds of information does the study cover? Where does the information come from? How does a scholar support his or her claims?
After writing about these aspects of your source material, develop a working thesis about your sources. NOTE: this thesis should NOT be a thesis about the topic itself so much as a claim about how scholars have approached that topic.

Towards this end, contemplate possible relationships amongst your sources.
Does one source cite or invoke others you've read?
Do any of your sources cover exactly the same things? What distinctions do you see in coverage/attention/areas of focus?
Does one update the information in the other? How do they work together chronologically? See if you notice a particular trajectory that scholarship has followed over time, or whether specific events or discoveries have had impact on the way scholars treat a subject.
Are there “new faces” that have surfaced in studies of the topic's history? (i.e., previously ignored groups or people)
If you don't see many overt connections amongst your sources, you can still focus on the various aspects of your topic that get covered in academic work: “Some scholars focus strictly on [x]; some discuss [y]. Others focus on [z]. Those who focus on [z] offer diverse perspectives. Collectively, they demonstrate the range of responses engendered by [topic].”
Finally, you'll need to conclude your paper with some thoughts on how you will enter into the discussion. What questions do your sources raise or leave open for your consideration? How might you bring the questions and answers your sources offer to bear locally, for our campus, your major, or other communities in which you are a participant?

Primary Objectives for this Assignment
- To learn strategies for conducting academic research;
- To gain experience using the university's library resources;
- To gain practice reading academic scholarship;
- To build a foundation upon which a final paper in the class will be based;
- To teach your classmates historical/cultural information that will enhance their understanding of the literary works we will read in the class;
- To learn material that you will share with your classmates;
- To improve your ability to discuss source materials in writing;
- To develop your skill at summarizing and paraphrasing;
- To improve your ability to introduce and comment on quotations;
- To develop your skill and efficiency at crafting smooth transitions between ideas and paragraphs;
- To review and apply the basic tenets of MLA documentation;
- To produce clean, clear, academic prose that is as free of grammatical and mechanical errors as possible.
Requirements and Tips
Your final draft of this assignment will be 4-5 pages and should address several of the following questions: What aspects of the topic’s history are most interesting to you and your audience? What aspects of this history have scholars explored and addressed? What particular arguments do these scholars make about the topic? What conversations and debates seem to be taking place, or have taken place, over time? What does this scholarship teach us about your topic? Of course, you shouldn't answer each of these questions one by one--such a response will read more like a list than an a discussion. Begin by freewriting about each question, and then work on organizing what you've read into a visual map or outline.

Your paper should discuss at least three academic sources and at least one public source (newspapers or blogs or anything you find online that you believe is credible and appropriate). Ideally, you will cover a variety of academic sources, including books and articles, older sources as well as more recent ones (1990 and later).

Your academic sources must be refereed academic sources obtained from Hofstra’s library databases. You may not use an encyclopedia (neither on-line nor print) as a major source of information in your paper, but feel free to begin your research process with one.

You should conceive of your audience as being an academic one; you are writing for the Hofstra community at large, which includes me and members of our course as well as other students, professors, and staff members. This audience will expect a tone and style that are formal and your sources should be credible to critical readers.

Keep in mind that this paper should cover primarily the historical background for your topic and a basic overview of what scholars say about your topic––what you'll hear sometimes described as a "review of literature."

In Assignment 10, you will be writing more specific arguments about this topic; here, in Assignment 9, you are providing yourself and your readers with the foundation that will lead to a deeper understanding and the ability to make and understand more sophisticated claims about it. That said, in reading the scholarly work of others, you should learn quite a bit about the topic itself along the way. You will eventually channel what you learn from this paper into a longer essay for Assignment 10, in which you will write your own argument about your topic using these and other sources as evidence for your claims.

You will practice writing Assignment 10 by working collaboratively with other members in the class to write a paper that meets most of these requirements (but will be significantly longer) in Assignment 9 3/4.
Quotation Workshop! Today's workshop will build on the work you completed in Assignment 6.

We'll start by going through some very basic components of MLA documentation, the citation system you will use for our course this semester (and possibly in future courses in the Humanities disciplines as well).

I'm providing a handout constructed from the MLA Sample paper The Purdue Owl that provides you with examples in which a writer not only integrates quotations effectively but also formats and punctuates them correctly. We'll discuss these examples together; I will also tell you how to do so with quotations from articles that do not have page numbers, since the format and punctuation will be different in these cases.

Next, we'll look at some examples from your submissions (with your names removed) in a Google Document; I will model some options for revising them.

Once we've covered these basic parts of our course, you'll be ready to return to your submission for Assignment 6 with an eye to improving your use of quoted material.

1) Access/Open the document you submitted for Assignment 6.
2) Read your narrative all the way through, and, though it may be tempting to edit aspects of your prose that distract you as you read, try to limit your immediate revisions to proofreading errors or glaring mistakes.
3) Attend to your paraphrased and quoted material closely, both in your draft and in the source itself.

a) With the paraphrased material, consider whether you have inserted any direct phrasing that should be placed within quotation marks that is currently not within quotation marks. Consider as well whether your reader would be able to tell which author and which source you're discussing from your language. Would your reader be able to find the source on his or her own in a works cited page from the draft as-is? If not, how could you improve the clarity of your sentences so that readers know where to look in both the works cited page and in "IRL"––that is, in a library or the internet. The goal is both to give credit to authors for ideas and to ensure readers can follow your footsteps when they want to learn more from your sources.

b) Focusing now on the quoted material, think about the way you've attributed the material and consider its effectiveness in each case based on the examples we revised in the previous part of the workshop. How can you improve upon your integration of the quoted material, both with respect to the clarity and efficiency of your prose and with respect to the way you've treated the author and quotation? For instance, do you use strong verbs and attributive tags effectively? Do you tend to use the same construction for these tags over and over again? Is the author's name prominent enough, or do you downplay the author and instead suggest "the article" performs the verbs of attribution? How much information do you provide about the venue in which an article appears? Do you think readers have enough information in the paragraphs you've crafted to know what kind of source you're quoting and find it credible? And here again, consider whether readers will be able to locate the source for themselves in your works cited page as well as "IRL" in a library, on library databases, or online.

From these considerations, revise as you see fit. If you'd like assistance at any point, raise your hand.

4) Now you will try your hand at making a works cited page (if you haven't done so already.) Instead of using auto-generators for the page, you must DO IT MANUALLY today! In order to determine how to cite your sources, read through the entries and examples this page from the Purdue Owl (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/07/) for articles, and then this page on formatting entries for electronic sources (https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/08/). YES, READ THROUGH THEM BOTH BEFORE YOU BEGIN. BOTH!

5) If you are satisfied with your treatment of quoted material in your narrative, assess the quality of your prose more generally and revise anything else that you think needs revision. You would do well to check on whether your revisions have introduced errors or repetitious diction that now needs additional attention.

6) When you're satisfied with your assignment, log on to Blackboard and click on "Submit Work." Find the link for submitting the Revised Assignment 6 and submit your new draft.
IF YOU DON’T FINISH BY THE TIME CLASS IS OVER: Submit your revised work no later than Friday 10/3 at 5PM.
IF YOU FINISH THE ITEMS ABOVE BEFORE CLASS IS OVER:

7) You may now consider your prose more broadly. For the best possible analysis of your prose, you'll need to think about grammatical problems you've had in all of your submitted work for the course. I returned a hard copy of your Assignment 1, so you'll need to find that hard copy and look through my handwritten comments first.

8) Once you've considered those comments, you can move on to comments in Assignments 2, 3, and 4. To access those comments, you'll need to login to Blackboard and find the links where you originally submitted these assignments (under "Submit Work" on our Blackboard site). To access the comments, you'll need to click on "Grademark" and then wait until the page loads your paper with comments. To see the comments, you'll need to hover your mouse over the highlighted material. Review all the comments I have made on your prose.

9) Open a document, and name/save your file as follows: [YourLastName]ProseStyle

10) After reviewing the comments on all of your assignments, what errors or problems come up repeatedly? For comments that indicate a specific grammatical problem, you may need to look up the error. Here is a link to the University of Texas Undergraduate Writing Center, which has handouts on common grammatical problems and other aspects of writing. Search the list to see if your particular issue is described there and read up on what the problem is, exactly, and how writers can revise sentences with those problems.

9) Write a paragraph about your prose style and what you see in it after reviewing my feedback. What aspects do you need to work on based on those comments?

10) Choose 5-7 sentences distributed over the entirety of submitted assignments that I've indicated as needing further revision. Cut and paste each sentence twice into your document. Leave the first instance as-is; in the second instance, revise to remove the problem.

11) Save the document in a place you'll be able to find it easily later; I will give you instructions on where to submit your revised sentences later in the course.

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