In past years, I have had a bad habit of just throwing information from sources into essays. I wasn’t very good at introducing them and giving the reader an important background on the information I was about to give them. I knew that it was required to add quotes from my sources in my assignments, so I sometimes would just throw random quotations in wherever even if it didn’t really make sense. Thankfully, throughout this semester I was able to break this bad habit and can use sources to my paper’s benefit. It was incredibly helpful to me to read the chapters in “They Say, I Say,” by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstien about quoting people. I found the templates that they provided were very useful and everything made a lot more sense to me after reading it. In my paper, “Something We’ll Never Agree On,” I used my new ability to select, integrate, and explain quotations to write, “In Jonathan Safran Foer’s text, ‘Against Meat,’ he talks about his personal struggles with the morality of eating meat and his path to vegetarianism. In this part of the paper, he talks about how he kept finding excuses to moralize eating meat saying, ‘Generally speaking, I didn’t cause hurt. Generally speaking, I strove to do the right thing. Generally speaking, my conscience was clear enough. Pass the chicken, I’m starving'(Foer). To elaborate, he didn’t agree with the killing of animals at all, but the idea that he, himself, wasn’t causing the animals pain, helped him ignore this.” I feel as though I am now at least sufficient at using sources as evidence in my papers.
