Part 1: Choose two of your sources. Each can be either a journal article, a book, or an essay published in a collected volume. Copy a portion of each one that is at least five paragraphs and no more than eight paragraphs long. You can copy it by scanning it if you have it in hard-copy, or by copying and pasting it if you have obtained it electronically. Print four copies of each one. On one copy of each article, underline or highlight a passage you believe will be worth quoting in your research project. Make sure you do this on only one copy of each.

Part 2: On a separate document, print a minimum of four quotations from different secondary sources you plan to use for your research essay. Two of these can be the ones you used for Part 1. Each quotation must be properly formatted and cited. One of these quotations may supply proprietary factual information (in Toulmin terms, evidence). Two must contibute to your warrants. The fourth can do either — your choice.

Below each quotation, explain how you plan to use the quotation in your essay — starting with whether you plan to use the quotation as evidence or as a warrant. Then, if the latter, explain whether you plan to extend, apply, logically rebut, or rebut based on evidence. Two or three sentences should be sufficient) in each case: what specific point (not your thesis) do you think the quotation will help you support and why. If you are using it as a warrant, how do you plan to extend its logic, or how can you apply it in a new way. If you are rebutting it, note where the logical flaw is, or what evidence you think the author ignores or misinterprets.

For Part 1:

The reasons to quote and cite sources are two-fold: to help you support your argument, and to give credit where you need to. Not every sentence is worth quoting, and not every bit of information needs to be quoted and cited.  As I have explained, you can quote for three reasons: 1) The source offers some kind of critical thought about the topic.  Any kind of judgment, evaluation, comparison, or analysis must be quoted and cited. 2) The source presents some kind of proprietary factual information. This means that what you learn in this source is the result of the author’s own research. This is distinct from common knowledge and readily acknowledged facts. 3) The source phrases some idea in a way that you admire so much that you believe it is worth quoting.

Type 3 quotations should be rare, generally speaking, and I do not want any in this assignment..

Note: You will almost never find good quotations in the first or last paragraphs of an essay or book chapter. The first paragraph — as you know by now — is where writers establish the issue they are exploring and sometimes offer a thesis. This means they are usually providing background, and much of what they say in the introduction will not be part of their argument. For example, someone may spend a paragraph explaining the current conventional understanding of the issue, and then spend the rest of the essay explaining why that conventional view is wrong. Nor do you want to quote a writer’s thesis, which the writer then uses the rest of the essay to support. You simply cannot deal fairly with someone’s entire argument without that argument taking over your essay. Finally, quoting the conclusion usually creates the same problem: the point is too big for you to deal with fairly. For these reasons, the best quotations will usually come from the body of an essay or book chapter. Look for specific points you can engage with fairly and completely.

For Part 2:

Make sure your quotations make sense out of context. If they do not, set them up in such a way that the meaning is clear.

Be careful to limit your quotations’ length. Long quotations present two major challenges. First, they make achieving a reasonable ratio of commentary to quotation difficult. When writers quote at great length, they tend to become emcees, as I have mentioned, and their authority over their own project diminishes as the project begins to resemle a collage instead of an essay. Second, if you do achieve a good ratio of commentary to quotation when you have quoted at great length, the result is that the source begins to take over your project. Instead of the project being your exploration of a particular issue, it becomes your explanation of someone else’s take on that issue.

For Part 1, as noted above, print four copies of each of the two selections, and then underline or highlight a passage you believe will be worth quoting in your research project on one copy only of each.

For Part 2, bring four copies of your document.