Quoting Exercise

There are three ways to include source material in your research paper writing: summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting. Each of these strategies capitalizes on different types of information that can be useful. The following exercise is designed to help you both gather content for your current work and learn different quoting techniques.

When you use a quotation from a passage, you have some options. You can direct quote or put the quotation (if it’s more than 4 lines) in a block quote. You can quote from the beginning of a sentence, from the middle, or from the end. You can use ellipses to take out or omit information (as long as you don’t misconstrue the message of the passage) to use the beginning and the end of the sentence but not the middle. You have many options. Using InfoTrac® College Edition or an online search engine find five short passages that help support your claim. These may be from different sources. Format and cite your quotations correctly, using the citation style your instructor prefers. Use the following examples to frame the format of the sentences you need to support your claim in your research paper. These examples use MLA-style formatting. Notice the different ways you can frame your sentences to correctly format your quotations and avoid plagiarizing.

a. Dr. Libby, a leading thinker at Intel, pointed out last year in Portland, “The next computer chip will double in speed” (34).

b. “And [the CLEP test] will surely be abandoned in composition courses nationwide by the end of the year . . . . The CLEP is no longer an accurate measurement in composition,” claimed the Writing Program Administrator (Punneo 23).

c. I discovered much research along these lines, in fact: “20,000 monitors that could have been used for K-6 classrooms [in our city] were destroyed last year,” according to Superintendent Bigalow (453).

d. “I like spam,” said the little girl from Brownfield, “and it reminds me of something much greater. It reminds me of products that receive bad press for one reason or another and then people in society think it’s gross” (Green 199).

e. Hubert Dreyfus in Mind Over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and Expertise in the Era of the Computer points out in the Preface that “The commonsense-knowledge problem, which has blocked the progress of conventional symbolic representation . . . , may, however, be looming on the neural-network horizon, although researchers may not yet recognize it” (xiii).

What are some strategies for good note taking for summarizing, paraphrasing, and especially for quoting? That is, what is plagiarism and how can you avoid falling into the unintentional plagiarism trap by taking good notes?
When you quote something, you use a capital letter with the first word of a direct quotation of a whole sentence, but you do not use a capital letter with the first word of a direct quotation of part of a sentence. Write these two examples out with something different you might use in your research paper. Write out a third example, too: if you interrupt a quotation with your own writing you do not capitalize the quotation when you pick it up again. For instance: “Blah, blah, blah,” said Mr. Spam, “blah, blah, blah” (34).
What do you do if you quote something from a passage that happens to include a quotation? You use single quotation marks for the quoted quotation. For instance: And then the newspaper person suggested, “When you read this book make sure you pay attention to the last line, ‘nothing begets nothing’” (Pearson xi). Find a quotation within a passage that is useful to support your claim and correctly write and reference it here.
Why is it important to correctly identify who said what in your research? List at least five reasons.

Name:

Student Email:

Professor Email: