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Integrating Information from Sources

Quotations and Paraphrases
Write all responses on a separate sheet.
When writing for many of your college courses, you will be expected to incorporate material from
your research. If you have to integrate the words and ideas of other writers into your own papers,
you will need to know how to quote and paraphrase effectively. For specific guidelines, read
Chapter 15 in The Writers World.
Whether you quote a statement or paraphrase it, you should attribute its content to its author,
using attributive tags such as those in the sentences below.

1. What do the numbers at the end of each example indicate?

According to Joshua Fleming, ________________ (234).
Attributive Tag

Brown and Mangan explain that ______________________ (67-68).

Examples

In Lees view, _______________________ (3).

She also stresses that ___________________ (45).
The writer points out that _________________ (21-22).
In her book ______, Stephanie Johnson maintains that _______________ (69).
Writing in the journal Conversations, Larkin claims that _______________ (123).

Be sure to use the authors full name upon first mention (e.g., Joshua Fleming) but just the last
name in subsequent references (e.g., Fleming).

2. Paraphrase the following lines. Include an attributive tag and a page number.
a. If the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it will, at bottom, depend on
the people themselves. (James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America, page 410)
b. The American Dream would have no drama or mystique if it were a self-evident falsehood
or a scientifically demonstrable principle. (Jim Cullen, The American Dream: A Short
History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation, page 7)
c. Buying locally grown and produced food has clear environmental, social, and economic
advantages (Katherine Spriggs, "On Buying Local," page 99)
d. Just as text can designate many things (Paradise Lost, a soup can label, a traffic sign), so
can reading. (Naomi S. Baron, "Redefining Reading: The Impact of Digital
Communication Media," page 193).
e. For a system of inequality to be stable over the long run, those who have more must
convince those who have less that the distribution of who gets what is fair, just, proper, or
the natural order of things. (Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, The Meritocracy
Myth, page 3).
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Attributive tags can be placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence.

According to Jim Cullen, The American Dream would have no drama or mystique if
it were a self-evident falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle (7).
Examples

The American Dream, claims Jim Cullen, would have no drama or mystique if it
were a self-evident falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle (7).

The American Dream would have no drama or mystique if it were a self-evident

falsehood or a scientifically demonstrable principle, asserts Jim Cullen in his book
The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea That Shaped a Nation (7).

3. Write three sentences in which you quote the line below. Place an attributive tag at the
beginning of the first sentence, in the middle of the second sentence, and at the end of
the third sentence.

If America were truly a meritocracy, we would expect fairly equal amounts of both
upward and downward mobility. (Stephen J. McNamee and Robert K. Miller, The
Meritocracy Myth, page 58)

If you do decide to use a quotation, especially a long one, it is often a good idea to follow the
quotation with a paraphrase in which you explain the quotation. The following attributive tags
are useful in explaining quotations as sentence starters.

Masons point is that _________________________________________________.

Sentence Starter
Examples

In other words, Fleming believes that ____________________________________.

In making this argument, Lee essentially claims that ________________________.
Basically, Johnson is asserting that ______________________________________.

4. Using a sentence starter, provide a follow-up explanation for the following quotation:

In her article "Tax Time: Why We Pay," Jill Lepore describes how taxes are put to use:
Taxes are what we pay for civilized society, for modernity, and for prosperity. The wealthy
pay more because they have benefitted more. Taxes, well laid and well spent, insure
domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, and promote the general welfare.
Taxes protect property and the environment; taxes make business possible. Taxes pay for
roads and schools and bridges and police and teachers. Taxes pay for doctors and nursing
homes and medicine. During an emergency, like an earthquake or a hurricane, taxes pay
for rescue workers, shelters, and services. For people whose lives are devastated by other
kinds of disaster, like the disaster of poverty, taxes pay, even, for food. (24)
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Notes on Different Methods of Formatting Quotations

1. Block quotations. Indent the left margin one inch. Place the page citation outside the
final period.

2. That. Do not use a comma or a capital letter after the word that. If the word following
that is capitalized in the original text, lowercase the first letter and put square
brackets around it.

Adams claims that [i]f the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it
will, at bottom, depend on the people themselves (410).

3. Indirect quotation. If you decide to quote someone who has been quoted in your
source, write qtd. in before the reference to your source.

Alexis de Tocqueville sensed a strange melancholy when in 1835 he observed

Americans who by outward measures had full lives (qtd. in Jillson 271).

4. Ellipsis points. Use three spaced ellipsis points to indicate that words have been
omitted from the middle of a quotation. Use three spaced ellipsis points and a period
to indicate that words have been omitted from the end of a quotation. No ellipsis
points are needed for information deleted from the beginning of a sentence.

According to Adams, If the American dream is to come true and to abide with us, it
will . . . depend on the people themselves (410).

Cullens asserts that [t]he American Dream would have no drama or mystique if it
were a self-evident falsehood . . . (7).

5. Square brackets. Use square brackets to modify words or to add clarifying words to a
quotation.

Adams believes that the fulfillment of the American Dream depend[s] on the people
themselves (410).

According to Adams, It [the American Dream] is not a dream of motor cars and high
wages . . . (404).
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Summarizing Paragraphs
Write all responses on a separate sheet.

When you summarize an entire paragraph, you will have to condense material. The following are
three common strategies:

Condense as much of the material from the paragraph as you can.

Describe what the author is doing (e.g., describing, explaining, arguing).

Paraphrase the topic sentence.

1. Read the paragraph below and the summaries that follow it. Identify the strategy used
in each summary.

Nearly all living creatures manage some form of communication. The dance patterns of
bees in their hive help to point the way to distant flower fields or announce successful
foraging. Male stickleback fish regularly swim upside-down to indicate outrage in a
courtship contest. Male deer and lemurs mark territorial ownership by rubbing their own
body secretions on boundary stones or trees. Everyone has seen a frightened dog put his
tail between his legs and run in panic. We, too, use gestures, expressions, postures, and
movements to give our words poignancy. (Olivia Vlahos, Human Beginning, page 10)

a. Almost any creature alive communicates in some way (Vlahos 10).

b. Communication among living creatures is actually quite common, ranging from

the dance of the bee to the gesture of the human being (Vlahos 10).

c. In Human Beginnings, Olivia Vlahos notes that communication among living

creatures is common; she provides examples such as bees dancing to signal food
and male deer rubbing against trees to mark their territory (10).

2. Using the strategies above to help you, summarize the following paragraphs in one or
two sentences. Try to capture the entirety of the writer's main idea and any support
crucial to understanding that idea. Be sure to include page numbers. (See a-c above for
models.)

a. Regrettably, certain realities impede the process of educating the young about the
dangers of alcohol. First, the vast majority of young adults feel invulnerable. Second,
learning in the abstract has little relationship to actual behavior. Third, as we seek to
educate about alcohol we are focused not so much on imparting knowledge as we are,
in effect, trying to change attitudes, and we all know how difficult that is in people of
any age. (David Weiner, "Drinking on Campus: An Old Practice That Begs for New
Solutions," page 8)
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b. [Roosevelt and Truman] could not have been more dissimilar. Roosevelt was now in
his twelfth year in office. . . . His wealth, education, the social position he had known
since childhood were everything Harry Truman never had. Life and customs on the
Roosevelt estate on the upper Hudson River were as far removed from Jackson County,
Missouri, as some foreign land. Roosevelt fancied himself a farmer. To Truman,
Roosevelt was the kind of farmer who had never pulled a weed, never known debt, or
crop failure, or a father's call to roll out of bed at 5:30 on a bitter cold morning. (David
McCullough, Truman, page 34)
c. Volcanos are landforms built of molten material that has spewed out onto the earth's
surface. Such molten rock is called lava. Volcanos may be no larger than small hills,
or thousands of feet high. All have a characteristic cone shape. Some well-known
mountains are actually volcanos. Examples are Mt. Fuji (Japan), Mt. Lassen
(California), Mt. Hood (Oregon), Mt. Etna and Mt. Vesuvius (Italy), and Paricutn
(Mexico). The Hawaiian Islands are all immense volcanos whose summits rise above
the ocean, and these volcanos are still quite active. (Joel Arem, "Rocks and Minerals,"
page 12)
d. I think we are innately suspicious of . . . rapid cognition. We live in a world that assumes
that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making
it. When doctors are faced with a difficult diagnosis, they order more tests, and when we
are uncertain about what we hear, we ask for a second opinion. And what do we tell our
children? Haste makes waste. Look before you leap. Stop and think. Dont judge a book
by its cover. We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as
possible and spending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust
conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when
haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a
much better means of making sense of the world. (Malcolm Gladwell, Blink, pages 13-
14).
e. Moral judgment entails more than putting oneself in anothers shoes. As the
philosopher Jesse Prinz points out, some acts that we easily recognize as wrong, such
as shoplifting or tax evasion, have no identifiable victim. And plenty of good deeds
disciplining a child for dangerous behavior, enforcing a fair and impartial procedure
for determining who should get an organ transplant, despite the suffering of those low
on the listrequire us to put our empathy to one side. Eight deaths are worse than one,
even if you know the name of the one; humanitarian aid can, if poorly targeted, be
counterproductive; the threat posed by climate change warrants the sacrifices entailed
by efforts to ameliorate it. The decline of violence may owe something to an expansion
of empathy, the psychologist Steven Pinker has written, but it also owes much to
harder-boiled faculties like prudence, reason, fairness, self-control, norms and taboos,
and conceptions of human rights. A reasoned, even counter-empathetic analysis of
moral obligation and likely consequences is a better guide to planning for the future
than the gut wrench of empathy. (Paul Bloom, "The Baby in the Well," pages 120-21).
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Citation and Documentation

Write all responses on a separate sheet.

Have you ever wondered why you have to cite and document sources or whether it is even possible
for anyone to own words and ideas? In some societies, words are not considered property. In the
United States, however, texts, images, and sounds are protected by copyright or patent laws. These
laws form the basis for citation and documentation conventions you have to follow in college.
Though these conventions may be challenged by the open-source movement, they must be
followed until the laws change. In short, these conventions require you to acknowledge (that is,
cite and document) any sources you use in your paper, whether you have quoted, paraphrased, or
summarized them. If you fail to follow the conventions, you will likely be accused of plagiarism
a charge that could result in a failing grade for the course.

Besides acknowledging sources to avoid such a charge, recognizing the work of others will
enhance your credibility as a writer and further the research done on a particular topic.

When using the work of an author, you can either place the author's name in the text or place it
between parentheses before the page number. Do not do both. If a text you are using was written
by two authors, cite both authors names. If information was taken from two pages and the first
and last page numbers have the same hundreds digit, drop this digit when writing the last page
number: (139-40).

According to Calvin Jillson, Americans have never been very good at balancing work
and leisure . . . (271).

Americans have trouble finding balance in their lives (Jillson 271).

1. When is it better to place the author's name in the text? When is it better to place the
author's name in parentheses?

2. Write two paraphrases of the following sentence. The first should have the authors
name in the sentence. The second should have the authors name between parentheses
at the end of the sentence.

American individualism and its focus on the importance of work as the pathway to
security and status has energized a nation and created great wealth and power, but it has
always had a darker side. (Calvin Jillson, page 271)

3. What is wrong with the following passage? How could it be improved?

Compromises must be made to promote safer sources of energy. To accommodate green

energy, the grid needs not only more storage but more high-voltage power lines
(Achenbach 137).
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4. When you draft and edit your paper, be sure you are using sources accurately and
ethically. Read the paragraph below. Then review the quotations, paraphrases, and
summaries that follow. Explain what is wrong with each.
Nearly all living creatures manage some form of communication. The dance patterns of
bees in their hive help to point the way to distant flower fields or announce successful
foraging. Male stickleback fish regularly swim upside-down to indicate outrage in a
courtship contest. Male deer and lemurs mark territorial ownership by rubbing their own
body secretions on boundary stones or trees. Everyone has seen a frightened dog put his
tail between his legs and run in panic. We, too, use gestures, expressions, postures, and
movements to give our words poignancy. (Olivia Vlahos, Human Beginnings, page 10)
a. Most living creatures manage some type of communication (Vlahos 10).
b. According to Olivia Vlahos, all living creatures manage some form of
communication (10).
c. Communication among living creatures is universal (Vlahos 10).
d. Vlahos urges the reader to become aware of the various ways animals
communicate (10).
e. Insects, fish, birds, and mammals all have ways to communicate. We, too, use
gestures, expressions, postures, and movements to give our words poignancy
(Vlahos 10).
5. When you draft and edit your paper, be sure you are using sources accurately and
ethically. Read the paragraph below. Then review the quotations, paraphrases, and
summaries that follow. Find the four that are problematic and explain what is wrong.
If climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years
farming as we know it will no longer exist. This means that the majority of people could
soon be without enough food or water. But there is a solution that is surprisingly within
reach: Move most farming into cities, and grow crops in tall, specially constructed
buildings. Its called vertical farming. (Dickson D. Despommier, "A Farm on Every Floor,"
par. 1)
a. Vertical farming is a way to provide food in the future.
b. Dickson D. Despommier believes that vertical farming may be the solution to the
growing demand for food and water (par. 1).
c. According to Dickson D. Despommier, in fifty years "farming . . . will no longer
exist" (par. 1).
d. Dickson D. Despommier claims that with the current pace of climate change and
population growth, the farming we are accustomed to will no longer be in
existence in fifty years (par. 1).
e. Vertical farming is the use of specially designed city buildings to grow crops
(Despommier par. 1).
f. If climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly
50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist (Despommier par. 1).
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6. Create a Works Cited page based on the following sources as if you had used them for
an essay. Use the information in The Writers World or another source we have used to
write bibliographic entries for the sources below. Your bibliography should have the
heading Works Cited centered on the page.

a. You used information from the book The Epic of America written by James Truslow
Adams. The book was published by Little, Brown in Boston. Its copyright date is 1931.

b. You cited information from Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy's book The Stone of
Heaven. The book was published by Little, Brown in Boston. Its copyright date is 2001.

c. You used information from the article "A World Too New" written by Edmund S.
Morgan. The article was published in October 2009. The article appeared on pages 82 to
96 in the magazine Smithsonian.

d. If you used another version of the article but accessed it online at Smithsonian.com on
October 24, 2009, how would the entry differ? The title of the online version is
"Columbus' Confusion about the New World." The page numbers for the online article
are 1-5. The sponsoring organization (usually found at the bottom of the Web page) is
Smithsonian Institution.

e. You used the article "The American Dream" written by Deborah Ward and published on
August 11, 2006. It appeared on page 19 of General Weekly. You used the LexisNexis
database on October 24, 2009.

f. You cited information from the online New York Times article "Rescuers Dig by Hand
after Indonesia Quake," written by Norimitsu Onishi and Peter Gelling. The article was
published on October 2, 2009. The sponsoring organization is The New York Times.

Notes for using online sources

If paragraphs or sections in an online source are numbered, cite the number(s) of the
paragraph(s) or section(s) after the abbreviation par. (or pars. for more than one paragraph)
or sec. (or secs. for more than one section).

a. Alston describes three types of rubrics for evaluating customer service (pars. 2-15).
b. Hilton and Merrill provide examples of effective hyperlinks (sec. 1).