Integrating Ideas

As said in my “Active Reading” section, my quotes always came from highlighting specific areas of the text that I felt backed my argument, the author’s argument, or my personal experiences. I feel this gave me strong points because I was able to directly tie all three together with the direct quotation from the text. With that being said, finding the quotations was never an issue for me, integrating them into my writing the correct way was something I had to learn throughout the semester. At first, I began with the simple high school method of adding what I wanted from the text and just putting it in quotations. As I began to work with Professor Brod in the recursive process he pointed out to me the right way to add the author’s words into my work. Using only their last name and adding the page numbers in parenthesis quickly became the norm for me in my essays. Once I was citing correctly, using active reading to pick out my quotations that would support my argument, and quoting the authors of said quotes correctly, I feel my essays took a huge step forward when it came to depth and clarity.

Here I used a quote from Emerging’s “Coddling of The American Mind” in my third essay to deepen my readers understanding of overprotection and overreaction on college campuses. I felt this was not only a good fit, but necessary for the audience to understand where my claim is coming from and the fact that I’m not the only one making this claim or seeing these issues. This background is needed to make a strong argument and it allows me to tie the text directly back to what I was saying prior.