“Thoughtless writers think they're doing the reader a favor by guiding her through the text with previews, summaries, and signposts” (Pinker, 2014, p.3).

“Quotation itself has a sinister edge, as the practice of quoting requires words and phrases to be ripped out of their original context and reconstituted in unfamiliar bodies of text” (Walker, 2013, p. 180).

“Her [Majorie Perloff’s] idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated” (Goldsmith, 2011, para. 3).

“Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person” (Adichie, 2009, 10.12).

Instruction:  Write a FULL sentence followed by a colon for any of the following quotes:

“Every word is changing a little bit, all the time. Look at a few lines of Middle English, and it is nigh impossible to find words that have not altered in spelling, pronunciation, meaning, grammar--or all four” (Johnson, 2019, para. 8).

“They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there” (Le Guin, 1975, p. 282).

“Writing by hand is slower and more cumbersome than typing, and students cannot possibly write down every word in a lecture” (May, 2014, para. 3).

Instruction:  Take one of these sentences. Quote it and make it a PART of a sentence.

(Sherman Alexie)  My family's house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs of the LeBrets to the north, the Fords to our south and the Tribal School to the west (Alexie, 1998, p. 54).

(Ursula Le Guin) The complex meanings of a serious story or novel can be understood only by participation in the language of the story itself. To translate them into a message or reduce them to a sermon distorts, betrays, and destroys them (Le Guin, 2019, para. 9).

(Anthony Goldsmith ) For them, [digital writers] the act of writing is literally moving language from one place to another, proclaiming that context is the new content. While pastiche and collage have long been part and parcel of writing, with the rise of the Internet plagiaristic intensity has been raised to extreme levels (Goldsmith, 2011, para. 9).

(Sean Sturm) The PF template is most problematic if it becomes the template, if we assume that there is only one way to write in the academy, whatever the content and methodology (Sturm, 2012, “Mundus vetus (the Old World)”, para. 1).

It helps me to remember that the conventions of writing have a fundamentally rhetorical nature. That is, I follow different conventions depending on the purpose and audience of my writing, because I know that I’ll come across differently to different people depending on how well I follow the conventions expected in any particular writing space. In a blog, I cite a source by hyperlinking; in an academic essay, I use a parenthetical citation that refers to a list of references at the end of the essay. One of the fundamental ideas of rhetoric is that speakers/writers/composers shape what they say/write/create based on what they want it to do, where they’re publishing it, and what they know about their audience/readers. And those decisions include nitty-gritty things like introducing quotations and citing paraphrases clearly (Stedman, 2010, p. 244).

Instruction: Quote one (or more sentences) from Stedman and shorten it/them by using an ellipsis and editing words out. Note: You can change the pronoun and the tense when you edit a quote).