Handling Quotes in Academic Writing

Dr. Eric Drown Whenever you intend to use a quoted or paraphrased passage, make these five essential moves. 1. Choose your quote well: Does this quote invite further explanation, clarification, discussion, development? Does it do useful work in the context of your paper? Dont choose quotes that speak for themselves. Dont choose quotes simply to confirm your thesis or a point that others have already made. Choose quotes that enable you to do more than convey information or to add color to your paper. Choose quotes that give you the opportunity to make an intervention of some kind in an already existing scholarly dialogue. Original quote: One thing to keep in mind about social media: the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing dynamics. And it makes many different realities much more visible than ever before. Racial divisions in American society should not shock anyone in this room, but the explicitness of them online can be quite startling. For example, even schools that are "integrated" show racial rifts through Friending practices. You can see homophily online and you can see the ways in which people who share physical space do not share emotional connections. (boyd [sic], 2009, n.p.) 2. Setup each passage you use: Use an attributional phrase to name the author and a citation that includes abbreviated publication information.), indicate the larger point being made by author in his or her context, and your intended use of passage/ idea/quote in your own context. While you should get all these elements in, they dont need to come in this order, nor do they need to all be in a single sentence. Setup: Educators interested in using digital media to connect students in their school with students in another demographically differentiated school, need to consider the implications of their technology choices as they design their lessons. In an article aimed at political activists and professionals interested in using social networking sites to enhance political participation, cyberculture sociologist danah boyd argues that the utopian rhetoric surrounding political uses of social networking sites obscures important characteristics of peoples actual online behavior (2009). 3. Convey your passage: Paraphrase, summarize, excerpt. Be sure your description is fair, and accurate, such that the original writer would agree that you have conveyed his or her point well. Be sure to attribute and cite paraphrased passages as well as those quoted directly. Passage Conveyed: In The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online, boyd argues that the internet mirrors and magnifies pre-existing [social] dynamics (2009, p. 6). Contrary to the popular belief that the internet brings people together in a unifying public sphere, boyds research reveals that users online behavior suggests that they tend to associate

online primarily with others whom they perceive to be significantly similar to themselves 2009, (p. 6). 4. Analyze it: Teach your reader how to see the text through your eyes. What interesting, useful, unusual, difficult, or revealing feature of the passage prompts your comment? What should your reader think of those features? Examine key terms, illustrate and clarify a point, explain what this passage is meant to exhibit, reveal implications and assumptions operational in it, refine the idea to fit a more general or more narrow context. Yoke it to other ideas or elements present in the sources about which youre making claims or the scholarly dialogue in which youre participating. Quotes dont speak for themselves. You need to demonstrate the thought processes that lead to your conclusions, not just present support for the conclusions themselves. Analysis: boyds argument turns on the concept of the public sphere. A public sphere is a communication arena where matters of cultural, political, and economic concern get debated. As boyd suggests, there are multiple, sometimes overlapping public spheres (p. 8). Its crucial to understand that not everyone has equal access to the public sphere(s); that not all public spheres are equal in terms of their power to persuade or in terms of their reach (how many people with what level of power participate in a particular public sphere).

5. Pay it off: Attach significance to your understanding of the passage in light of the aims and claims of your paper, explain how understanding it in the way you do impacts the scholarly dialogue, connect it to the ideas youre exploring in your paper. Without payoff, readers are free to connect it to your argument in any way they see fit. Part of the challenge of written communication is limiting misreadings of your intent when youre not present to answer questions or offer corrections. So be clear and explicit about what you intend this passage to have done for your work in the paper. Payoff: People who want to create more equal communications spaces online (whether for enhanced political debate or educational purposes) need to attend carefully to the social and political dynamics of the arena they create. One thing this means for teachers is that the frequent communication between demographically different student populations made possible by the internet will not necessarily enable them to collaborate successful. Teachers will need to customize the online communication environment to create a contact zone that empowers both groups to take ownership of it, while recognizing that at first, neither group may feel entirely at home in the online setting. Reference: boyd, danah. (2009). "The not-so-hidden politics of class online." Personal Democracy Forum, New York, June 30.