Reflection – Integrating Ideas

Please read the entire post before responding.

Write a reflective essay that assesses your current ability to integrate your own ideas with those of other writers by comparing at least two samples from your essays to the standards set out in the Integrating Ideas Learning Outcome below. To what degree are the ideas expressed in your own ideas formed and expressed in dialogue with those of other writers. How effectively do you use the techniques of integration?

400 words or more.

Further instructions: Build this essay around 2 samples of you integrating your ideas with those of other writers in one of the two essays we’ve written so far. You’re looking for moments when you’ve written paragraphs or paragraph-sequences that included quoted or paraphrased material from other writers. In your reflective essay, be sure to discuss the purposes for which you included the words of other writers, how you created a context for the borrowed material, your use of signal phrases, voice markers, and other technical aspects of quote integration, what strategies you used following the quote

In your reflective essay, include context-sensitive links to the Papers posts that contain your samples of your writing process and copy-and-paste your samples into your reflective essay itself. Be sure to explain how the evidence in those links support your claims.

At the end of the essay, use our NY | NTG | OK | G | EX scale to rate your skill in integrating your ideas with others.

Integrating Ideas Learning Outcome: Writers Work with the Words of Others to Make Their Own Meaning

Experienced writers use the words of others:

1. As the object of their analysis
2. To supply background information
3. To contribute key concepts or ideas
4. To provide positions or arguments with which to wrestle
5. To shift the direction of the conversation
6. To bring in new perspectives that:
   1. Question, challenge, complicate or reject the most obvious ways of thinking
   2. Turn the issue, question or problem so that it can be seen from another angle.

Experienced writers ___________ the words of others.

• Explain
• Interpret
• Build on
• Extend
• Confirm
• Apply
• Question
• Challenge
• Complicate
• Reject
  

Experienced writers effectively embed the words of others in their writing by:

1. Creating a meaningful context for the words (summaries, quotations and paraphrased) they borrow from others
2. Fairly representing the meaning of the words (as determined by the original context) they borrow from others
3. Distinguishing their own words from the words they’re borrowing by using
   1. Well-chosen signal phrases
   2. Voice markers that convey their attitudes towards the borrowed words
   3. Parenthetical citation
4. Explaining how their own ideas connect with the ones they are borrowing
5. Embedding the words of others into sentences of their own
6. Using block quotes appropriately
7. Using ellipses … to indicate omitted words and brackets [ ] to indicate inserted words
8. Providing readers direct access to sources through quotation and indirect access to sources through summary, paraphrase, parenthetical citation, and Works Cited.