English 102 Assignments

Source Integration Exercise #2

This is a repeat assignment: it works the same way as the first one, but you must use the remaining two sources provided in the “Research Articles by Theme” module.

This week, as an important part of your preparation for your second major paper (and also as a way of beginning the difficult work of making a bibliography for that paper, I’d like you to

practice integrating and using in-text citations for your sources. Keep in mind the sources for your paper are provided for you in the module called “Research Articles by Theme.”

You should write two separate sentences, with citations, and each one should be from a different source.

Integrating a quotation means incorporating it into your writing gracefully, with a signal phrase or brief introduction. Chapter 3 of They Say, I Say has all the information you need.

In-text citations come after quotations and paraphrases, and they give credit to the source as well as help your readers track the information (these citations work in tandem with your bibliography so that readers can find your sources on their own).

Here’s an example of what you need to produce for this assignment. I’m using Carr’s book here, but like the Bibliographic Exercise, you may not use Carr for this exercise.

According to Carr, “What both enthusiast and skeptics miss is what McLuan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act” (3).

Notice a few things: first, the quote is introduced with a signal phrase (“According to Carr”); second, because I mentioned the author’s last name in the signal phrase, I don’t need to repeat it in the actual in-text citation; and third, the period for this sentence is outside, or after, the in-text citation. All these little things matter! Here is how the sentence looks if I don’t mention his name in the signal phrase:

One writer has noticed that McLuan tends to be misunderstood: “What both enthusiast and skeptics miss is what McLuan saw: that in the long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in influencing how we think and act” (Carr 3).

Notice I use his name in the citation, with no comma in between his name and the page number, and because the signal phrase is a complete sentence, I use a colon before the quote, rather than a comma.