Blocking Quotes and Key Phrases

QUIZ

Original Passage: Malcolm Gladwell talks about how he got the idea for his book Blink. Use this as your original passage for the quiz.

Believe it or not, it’s because I decided, a few years ago, to grow my hair long. If you look at the author photo on my last book, The Tipping Point, you’ll see that it used to be cut very short and conservatively. But, on a whim, I let it grow wild, as it had been when I was teenager. Immediately, in very small but significant ways, my life changed. I started getting speeding tickets all the time–and I had never gotten any before. I started getting pulled out of airport security lines for special attention. And one day, while walking along 14th Street in downtown Manhattan, a police van pulled up on the sidewalk, and three officers jumped out. They were looking, it turned out, for a rapist, and the rapist, they said, looked a lot like me. They pulled out the sketch and the description. I looked at it, and pointed out to them as nicely as I could that in fact the rapist looked nothing at all like me. He was much taller, and much heavier, and about fifteen years younger (and, I added, in a largely futile attempt at humor, not nearly as good-looking.) All we had in common was a large head of curly hair. After twenty minutes or so, the officers finally agreed with me, and let me go. On a scale of things, I realize this was a trivial misunderstanding. African-Americans in the United States suffer indignities far worse than this all the time. But what struck me was how even more subtle and absurd the stereotyping was in my case: this wasn’t about something really obvious like skin color, or age, or height, or weight. It was just about hair. Something about the first impression created by my hair derailed every other consideration in the hunt for the rapist, and the impression formed in those first two seconds exerted a powerful hold over the officers’ thinking over the next twenty minutes. That episode on the street got me thinking about the weird power of first impressions.

1) Do a BLOCK QUOTE using part of the above passage.

(photos on the back & Question 2 & 3 on the back)

2) Now select a shorter quote from the same original passage and set it up so you can show that you know how to use CONTEXTUALIZING QUOTES.

3) Now select something from the original passage and do a KEY PHRASE quote.