Integration of different sources was never my strong suit when it came to writing. Most people will say it is hard for them to include personal examples in their writing and using sources is easy, but for me it is quite the opposite. It has always come easy to me to include personal experience in my writing. I am so used to not talking about my feelings that when I get the opportunity to write about it I will never shy away from it. So when trying to use other sources I sometimes feel like they will take away from the point I am trying to prove rather than boost it. I have learned that this isn’t the case. Below is a paragraph from an assignment earlier in the year when answering reflection questions on the book They Say, I Say.
“Often there is a struggle between students and including outside perspectives and conversations into their writing as it can be confusing or they just don’t want it to take away from the point they are trying to prove. As we read chapter 1 of “They Say, I Say,” we are introduced on how to effectively use what other people say to enhance and develop our writing. One specific piece that was mentioned was, “summarize what “they say” as soon as you can in your text and remind readers of it at strategic points.” (pg. 21) As you write you want to incorporate others writing, research, or opinions to help prove your point even further. This is one of the most beneficial things you can do in writing as it gives a preview of the points that are motivating your argument the most, rather than just providing the reader with all your information up front and then moving into argumentative context. It is also useful to keep your reader informed. If you leave to much room between your quotes or apposing points, readers may forget the goal you’re trying to establish with your writing. I believe using “They Say” is a good tool to keep in your writing as it keeps readers engaged and makes your work more well-rounded.”
The highlighted sentence in the paragraph was my only use of “They Say” and everything else was my own ideas or “I Say.” My writing shows my fear of letting the sources overtake my own opinion. I was so scared of not being able to prove my point that I avoided using quotes as much as possible. My use of one shows that I needed to use it to prove my point but didn’t want to include to much “They Say” in my personal response.
I have now learned that it is okay to use sources more through different paragraph structure templates like the Barclay paragraph or the T.R.I.A.C paragraph. They help me use more than one source, explain what they have to say, and then I can relate it back to the point I want to prove. It is kind of like a transition or a back up to my thoughts and is really beneficial when trying to make an argument as it is extra evidence that someone professional actually wrote. We also looked at partial quotes or paraphrasing which I practiced as well. Below is an example of a Barclay paragraph I wrote in my first essay on empathy.
“A main point of empathy that is often overlooked is the natural limitation of our mental capacity. Mentally a person can only handle so much pain or suffering, which are common emotions in relation to empathy. There is only so much a person can do when there is so much trauma and depression in this world. Out of the eight billion people in the world, mentally a person can only have up to three sets of emotion, including themselves as one of the three. In Bloom’s view, “ Can you simultaneously empathize with two people? If so, good, congratulations. Now add a third person to the mix. Now try 10. And then 100, 1,000, 1,000,000” (3). Bloom’s goal is to make you think, if you take into account the school shootings that have been happening recently, you can feel bad and sympathize for the general population that was involved, but you cannot empathize on a deep level with every adult or child involved. We choose the one to two people to empathize with based on our beliefs, which circles back to the first point. Maria Konnikova also elaborates on this stance in her text, The Limits of Friendship. Konnikova states, “The most intimate Dunbar number, five, is your close support group… if we’re busy putting in the effort, however minimal, to “like” and comment and interact with an ever-widening network, we have less time and capacity left for our closer groups” (4,5). Her goal is to inform us that once we start trying to feel the emotions of others, we aren’t able to connect to that person as deeply as we would if they were one the five closest people in our lives. Going back to Bloom and DFW’s pieces, one thing that I found was different but can relate to this specific circumstance, is that in Bloom’s piece we learn that empathy is the feeling of others emotions based off of knowledge of them or their situation, while DFW’s piece focuses on sympathy of a person in their current occurrence that is unknown other than surface level information like body language. We can sympathize for many people on a surface level, but when it comes to the deeper understanding of a person and their situation, that is true empathy and that can be hard.“
In this new more developed paragraph, you can see that I learned that it is beneficial to my writing to bring in others ideas to help justify my own. Using both Maria Konnikova and Paul Bloom’s ideas, I was able to elaborate on my own ideas and back them up.
Through using these new structural methods I am now confident in my integration skills. I have found over the course of the semester that I have used source integration frequently in other classes as well as Writing 110. Through the next semester I am confident that I can successfully integrate sources so that I can prove my main points without overpowering my own voice.
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