Write: Paragraph outline of your response to the blink-write. The outline should have an overall thesis sentence, and a topic sentence for each paragraph. You should also choose at least one representative quotation taken from the blink-write for each paragraph, and use the "frame and chop" technique to write it into a new sentence.
Links to Video: Part I (Breakfast and Lunch), Part II (Lunch and Dinner)
More Weirdness: Check out this "photoshop" picture. The older man is Bill James and the younger man is Theo Epstein - two characters in Moneyball. The meaning of the picture is that Epstein has used the new quantitative analysis about defensive statistics (created by statisticians like James) to change the strategies of his Boston Red Sox team. Thus he loves "run prevention."
More quotation technique: I already shared the Google Document of the changes to Kim's sentences I made in class, but I also found a related blog post from a class I taught in California last year. Maybe it will be helpful too... click the comments below to read.
Links to Video: Part I (Breakfast and Lunch), Part II (Lunch and Dinner)
More Weirdness: Check out this "photoshop" picture. The older man is Bill James and the younger man is Theo Epstein - two characters in Moneyball. The meaning of the picture is that Epstein has used the new quantitative analysis about defensive statistics (created by statisticians like James) to change the strategies of his Boston Red Sox team. Thus he loves "run prevention."
More quotation technique: I already shared the Google Document of the changes to Kim's sentences I made in class, but I also found a related blog post from a class I taught in California last year. Maybe it will be helpful too... click the comments below to read.
Hey Aaron,
ReplyDeletecan you provide us the link to the film?
maybe some of us want to watch them again?
BLOG POST ON QUOTATIONS THAT I MADE IN A CLASS I TAUGHT LAST YEAR... MAYBE THIS WILL BE USEFUL, MAYBE NOT
ReplyDelete------------------------------------------------------------------------
One analogy I like to use is that quotations are like wild dogs. They can be a good and useful companion, but they need to be curbed or trained first. Otherwise they will tear apart all the shit in your house. The point being that just using a semi-relevant quotation does not score you a "point," as it might have in high school or even in some other college classes. It should be expected of a college student in an upper-level humanities class that you can find textual evidence. What you need to do further is smoothly incorporate the quotations. From a conceptual standpoint, this means providing a context for the quotation you're going to use... making sure it's clear where it came from and why you are using it. Choosing the best possible example and using it to make some kind of point of your own. I am always skeptical about longer quotes, and block quotes in particular, because they tempt you to skip your own point, your own reasoning. As if they are self-explanatory. They're not. YOU should be making the point, not your quotes. You should be holding the leash.
I actually think that most of you are doing this OK at the conceptual level, so this may be more of a technical problem. But a technical improvement can also lead you to a conceptual one, because the technique I am going to advocate is breaking the quotations into smaller pieces. This will allow your sentences to have your OWN subjects and verbs rather than the quoted author's. This will lead to more control of Spot, in other words. It will also avoid the bizarre tense and number disagreements that occur when quotations are carelessly crammed between your sentences. And it will encourage the good habit of never quoting more than is absolutely necessary. Never quote when a paraphrase would just as easily do.
Here are some examples of improper usage, with corrections. No personal criticism is meant to the authors, or any of you for that matter. Nobody bothered to teach you this. I myself didn't get the hang of it until graduate school, but it's really basic and important, and it will make you sound smarter.
(examples follow)
PROBLEMATIC ORIGINAL
ReplyDeleteIn their introductory essay on the novel, Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita depict, “Who Would Have Thought It? does not adhere to the precepts of the typical romance of domesticity, for it takes women from the domestic sphere into public domains and readers into the space of politics … The construct of domesticity in many nineteenth-century novels is one of the conventions that served to reinforce the notion that women were limited to the home and hearth” (Sanchez & Pita x).
CORRECTED VERSION
Note how I freely excerpt and rearrange the quotation in order to suit my own logic, even though I don't unduly distort its basic meaning.
In their introductory essay, RS & BP argue that WWHTI "does not adhere to the precepts of the typical romance of domesticity." DeBurton's novel provides a broader range of themes than counterparts like Little Women, vaulting its female characters and its implied female reader "into the space of politics" rather than simply leaving them in the space of "home and hearth."
PROBLEMATIC ORIGINAL
Rosaura Sanchez and Beatrice Pita reveal Mina’s character in the introduction. After describing Mina as a representation of one of the first forms of feminist struggles in the nineteenth century, they further examine Mina’s principles. “It is the Norvals’ French maid Mina, for example, who advocates free love and is far more astute and sophisticated—and ultimately loyal—to Lola than either of the two Norval daughters” (xxxvii, de Burton). Mina practices “free love” which means she condones the practice of choosing who to love and how to love. Mina believes in independence from the social and economic constraints of marriage. Mina embodies an independence from social standards through her ability to engage in sex with whomever she chooses.
CORRECTED VERSION
This author actually does OK providing context for the quotation, but much of the quotation is unnecessary.
RS & BP reveal Mina's character in their introduction to the novel. After describing Mina as a representation of one of the first forms of feminist struggles in the nineteenth century, they further examine Mina’s principles, in particular her advocacy of "free love." Mina believes in independence from the social and economic constraints of marriage. Indeed Mina embodies that independence from social standards by engaging in sex with whomever she chooses.
NOT SO BAD ORIGINAL
The narrator relates that “The old lady and Jemima put up pickles, and made butter and applesauce; all of which articles, being of good quality, commanded high prices in the Boston market” (p. 56).
EVEN BETTER
We then learn that Jemima and her mother are producers, making pickles, butter, and applesauce that they then sell in Boston for "high prices."
ORIGINAL THAT KNOWS THE TECHNIQUE BUT FAILS TO APPLY IT TO SECONDARY SOURCE QUOTATIONS
ReplyDeleteRuth states that Lola’s parents must be “Indians or negroes, or both” (17), which shows the reader the incredible narrow-mindedness of the white ruling class. Anyone who was outside of their racial standing, just by skin color alone, was automatically considered inferior. “In the first quarter of the twentieth century, ‘scientific’ I.Q. tests, which were really culturally biased, substantiated an erroneous notion about the relationship between lower mentality and dark skin color,” (Stoddard 79).
CORRECTED
Ruth states that Lola’s parents must be “Indians or negroes, or both” (17), which shows the reader the incredible narrow-mindedness of the white ruling class. Anyone who was outside of their racial standing, just by skin color alone, was automatically considered inferior. We can see a similar attitude by looking at the development of IQ testing several decades later. As Remus Stoddard explains, these tests were not really "scientific," but rather "culturally biased." In particular, the tests "substantiated an erroneous notion about the relationship between lower mentality and dark skin color” (79).
BUT WHAT IF MY QUOTATION IS TRICKIER THAN THOSE?
Use ellipsis (...) to leave something out. Use brackets [these] to change verb tenses. This short excerpt from my dissertation, which is distressingly dry and nerdy and not otherwise a model for good writing, does serve as a pretty good example of these technical maneuvers.
http://laughingdove.net/rosie/sample.pdf