Integrating Ideas
We were given endless opportunities this semester to work on integrating ideas from various sources into our texts. I used Barclay’s paragraph formula as a guide when writing and revising my Discourse essay, and used They Say, I Say templates to avoid “hit and run quotations.” Instead of wasting words on summarizing entire works by different authors, I tried to keep things simple. I introduced the author and title of each work, then followed that with a quote. I did my best to rewrite each quote in my own words after to better explain each one, just like They Say, I Say suggests. Examples of me summarizing and utilizing a source can be found every body paragraph of my Discourse essay, but this one with James Gee is from the first paragraph: “This is why it’s so critical to expose all children to more sophisticated Discourses at a young age. James Gee directly acknowledges this in his introductory essay. Gee says that the only way to learn any Discourse is to be completely immersed in it and complete an ‘apprenticeship’ of sorts (8). In other words, Gee believes that it’s impossible to learn a Discourse in an artificial setting such as being taught by a teacher in a school.”
Just as Barclay’s formula suggests, I tried to state my claim at the beginning of each paragraph and return to it after every new quote to make sure I was explicitly stating how it works to prove my claim. “I agree that acquiring a secondary Discourse requires complete immersion in the Discourse but, unlike Gee, I think that school is the perfect place to be introduced to a dominant secondary Discourse.” I then did my best to seamlessly transition to introducing and using Delpit as a way to juxtapose Gee’s ideas. “Lisa Delpit disputes Gee’s claim that secondary Discourses can’t be directly taught in her critique of his essay by describing numerous examples of people of color succeeding after being taught a more acceptable secondary dominant Discourse in class. She states, ‘These teachers also successfully taught the more subtle aspects for dominant Discourse’ (549). The teachers also “insisted that students be able to speak and write eloquently, maintain neatness, think carefully,…,'(Delpit 549) among other things.”
