4 Levels of Quote Integration:

Sample text taken from Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid.”

(1) The Cut-and-Paste (aka the hit and run, aka the drive by, aka the “who’s that guy”).  Social equivalent: some guy walks up to a group of people, catches the last thing someone said, and blurts something out that he hopes is related.  Awkward silence ensues. 

As we use the tools that extend our mental capacities we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. “The clock disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences… [the] abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought” (Mumford).

(2) The Interruption.  Social equivalent: some guy enters the same conversation above and, instead of waiting until you’ve finished your thought, he finishes your sentence for you.  You’re impressed that he is able to seamlessly meld his or her grammar with your own, but most people seem kind of freaked out. Who invited that guy? Note: this strategy is often praised in high school and occurs in plenty of professional writing, but one doesn’t get the sense that the author is fully in control, fully managing the voices that enter the paper. 

As we use our “intellectual technologies” we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies (Bell). For example, the mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” As a result this “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought” (Mumford).

(3) Beginning to Frame it out: 

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. The abstract framework of divided time became the point of reference for both action and thought.”

(4) Fully Framed:

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford argues that the clock was one such extension that came to change the very way we view the world: “The clock disassociated time from human events,” Mumford contends, “and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.”  For example, instead of going to bed when the sun goes down, we go to bed at 10:00–especially if we have electric light.  “The abstract framework of divided time,” Mumford continues, “became the point of reference for both action and thought.” Thus, the clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man.

General Rules:

(1) Avoid the hit-and-run use the  blend only for very brief quotes, and even then you should use a signal phrase.  Use strategic combinations of the fully framed and the lightly framed models. Always err on the side of the fully framed.
(2) The longer the quote, the more substantial the framing you will need. And choose quotes that benefit from substantial framing.
(3) Add signal phrases to break up long quotes and to gain control of the voices in your paper.
(4) Set off longer quotes that form a sentence with colons rather than a period.
(5) Quotes don’t speak for themselves: use framing strategies–set-up and follow-up especially–to relate the quote more closely to your argument or conversation.

 

Sample 2 From Carr:

(1) What’s missing here?  What do we need and where do we need it?

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading. “We are not only what we read.  We are how we read” (Wolf). When we read online we tend to become “mere decoders of information.”

(2) What strategies does the author use in the more fully framed version?

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

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