Writing History Faithfully

Monday October 1, 2012

     Today we talked about when to cite information in a paper.  Today's class went along with chapters three and four out of our "Writing History" book.  Chapter three was about accurately gathering and citing sources.  The text put a great deal of emphasis on making sure to make a clear distinction between your words and ideas and those of someone else.  The book says to use an even amount of summarizing and paraphrasing and to use quotes occasionally.  While some writers do this, I know that I tend to use quotes and paraphrasing whenever I know that it will make my argument stronger because it is a good piece of evidence/a good source. 
     We did several exercises in class that helped us to understand how to cite, paraphrase, and quote things.  One exercise had us looking at the colonies' problems with the king.  This had us looking at old English and we had to figure out what the colonists were trying to say in order to summarize the ideas.  Then, things got interesting.  The professor gave us a photocopy that came from a book about Lewis and Clark's expedition, but it was written through the eyes of Indians.  We read three different paragraphs and we were supposed to paraphrase the content of each paragraph in groups.  Once the group agreed on a good sentence or two to paraphrase the entire paragraph, one person went up to the board and wrote out the answers.  After all groups had done this we voted on who's we thought did the best job.  Everyone did a pretty good job and it was interesting to see that each group used something different; no two paraphrases were the same.
     After that exercise, we were given another photocopy about lawn care in Victorian America.  Again, we worked in the same groups and were supposed to read five different paragraphs.  This time, instead of paraphrasing, we were supposed to summarize the contents of each paragraph.  The catch, however, was to turn an entire paragraph of about five to eight sentences into one.  I found this quite challenging because there was a lot of good information that I wanted to include, but couldn't.  After we made out sentences were put them back up on the board.  By this time the class was getting pretty competitive about who had the best sentences.  The voting was actually pretty close, I don't remember who won, but everyone had good sentences.  Like I said earlier, every group came up with different sentences based on what they found most important in the paragraphs.
     These activities tied into the idea of our Senior Seminar papers.  Since the paper is quite lengthy, we will need to figure out which information we want to summarize, paraphrase, or quote.  Since I will be looking at newspaper articles I think I will be using a bit of all of these.  I think I will only use quotes when the information is written in a very organized manner or if it is better than anything that I could come up with to relate the same information.