When (Not) to Quote

I wish to start this post with a pair of related essay experiences. Both essays turned to quotes from major historical figures to help prove their points. One quoted Winston Churchill, the other, Mahatma Gandhi. When I share this in my classes, I ask my students what they think these essays were about. The answers invariably center around war, politics, history, Britain, and major geopolitical issues of the last century.

Nope. The essays were about horse training and...childhood obesity.

That's right. Someone padded an essay on childhood obesity by turning to the man famous for hunger strikes.

I haven't had many students try to defend these choices, and I will admit, this is far from the worst transgression committed in composition class, but it is a symptom of at least one of three issues: procrastination and poor research, and lazy writing.

Procrastination and Poor Research

Examples include: a bibliography page that barely meets the required number of sources.

This means the student was required to find X number of sources, and rather than find and read books and articles to find the best, most relevant information available, they worked until they found one less than X sources. Then, to reach the required number, they turned to something like Wikiquote and looked up famous people – whether or not the quote or the person being quoted was related to their topic. They drop the quote in their essay and voila! X number of sources achieved! 

This generally happens because of procrastination and using the first available sources rather than the best ones. Had the student been concerned with finding the best sources, they would have found more than the required minimum and would have familiarized themselves with enough of them so, even in a pinch when the due date is fast encroaching, they can turn to solid research to fill the requirement. Best case scenario, though, you never have to think about the number of sources because you've done enough research you'll meet and exceed the required amount easily.

Lazy Writing

Examples include: introductions or conclusions that have more words from, probably dead, famous people rather than the author’s own words.

My tongue-in-cheek comment is not dealing with plagiarism (which is one of the worst sins committed in composition courses), but rather taking the profound statements of others and using them to prove a point you should be trying to prove in your essay. It's lazy writing because, rather than taking the time to really think about what you have to say, you're relying on the words of someone more famous and perhaps more eloquent than yourself. In that respect, it's related to filling space on the bibliography: it's filling space in the body of an essay to reach a page count.

These quotes are usually misplaced and taken out of context. They also may be unnecessarily long and rely more on the reputation of the person being quoted than on what the words actually express. 

The biggest problem is relying on fame rather than expertise: Churchill and Gandhi are certainly famous people, but they are not qualified in horse training and childhood obesity. Being able to properly integrate the works of experts builds your own authority as a writer: you have something to contribute because you know the literature well enough to work with it. But if you default to major historical figures unrelated to your field, it says you don't know what's going on in your field and therefore you don't know what you're writing about.

Conclusion

Quoting for the sake of quoting is a bad practice. It leads to quotes taken out of context, often with unnecessary fanfare that distracts from the subject of the essay. It becomes a matter of building false authority rather than proving your knowledge and your qualifications to write on the subject. There is a lot to gain from quoting, but it can all be undone by doing it poorly. Before quoting, make sure you properly understand what it is you are quoting, where it came from, what it means, and the qualifications, not the fame or popularity, of the person you are quoting.

Organization: An Overview

Organization is ubiquitous and yet invisible. It’s an issue identified with words like “flow,” and transition,” terms that are neither technical nor specific. An essay should flow, but what does a flowing essay look or sound like? Should an essay flow like a river?...What does that even mean?

Maybe a different comparison. 

In filmmaking, editing is the process of piecing together the different shots of film into a coherent whole. It involves sifting through the filmed footage and finding the best parts to include and putting them together seamlessly: so that you don’t even realize it’s going on. Poor editing stands out. Good editing goes unnoticed.

A well organized essay will do the same thing. You’ll be able to move from word to word, sentence to sentence, and paragraph to paragraph without stopping to notice the fact the subject matter has changed or shifted. Organization is supposed to make the transition from topic to topic smooth and understandable: to tame the beast that composing an essay.

There are many topics that address the finer nuances of organization, none of which I have time to adequately discuss here; I’ll have to devote a specific post to each one later. For now, a simple overview will have to suffice.

• Outlining: Listing the topics you are going to write about in the order you are going to write about them.
• Methods of Organization: Using a specific form or model to give your essay a way to disseminate the information. There are a lot of different methods, and sometimes an essay will employ several.
• Transitions: Statements at the start and ending of paragraphs designed to signal the subject matter is changing. And an issue with which I have mixed feelings.
• Balance: Making sure each topic receives a fair amount of attention, and the essay is not spending undue time and attention where it should not.
• Thesis Consistency: Tracking the development of the essay’s thesis from the very start to the very end of the essay.
• Paragraph Structure: Not just the essay but the information in paragraphs need to be carefully structured and developed.
• Topic Sentences: Sub-theses for your paragraphs.
• Sentence Structure: Determining how best to place information in specific sentences so that their form and structure emphasizes your point.
• Tangents: Oddities that arise and appear out of place. They do not support the thesis and introduce topics not discussed elsewhere.

This is, at best, only some of the issues dealing with organizing. It is, as I said, made up of many topics and finer nuances. I hope that this list gives at least an understanding of how nuanced and ubiquitous it can be.

You may also notice that I left out “flow.” This was a deliberate choice. I use it to describe essays, but only for lack of a better word. I don’t feel like it’s a great teaching tool because all it really says is the information throughout the essay made sense. It doesn’t give me a model to present to a class or write about here, and it may not even mean the student has fully grasped the concept of organization. Maybe they got lucky. Maybe they wrote a way that made sense to their professor. I can teach a lot of things about organization, but I can’t teach “flow.”

My purpose in this introductory post is to emphasize the complexity of an otherwise undervalued topic. There are so many things more apparent when it comes to writing and composition, like thesis, editing, research, citations, etc, that organization can be relegated to a day or two in any curriculum on the rush towards more apparent topics. Therefore, I don’t want to take it lightly or undervalue it. I want to give it the time and attention it deserves.

Beware the Split Thesis

I panic a little when I see words and phrases like “and” and “as well as” in thesis statements.

I say a little because there are plenty of acceptable ways to use these in a thesis, but there are also examples that amount to “This essay is about Topic A... and it's also about Topic B.” Consider the following:

This essay will analyze the breeding practices and training techniques of bichon frises and golden retrievers.

This is a split thesis. The difference here is there isn't anything to suggest why these two things, joined by the “and” are being brought together: What do breeding practices and training have to do with one another? Why these dogs? Why not throw the dog's diet and health problems in there, too? What about corgis and papillons, or poodles and labradors?

Tangential Topics

I think this problem stems from writers having a few related topics but never developing a significant correlation between them. They go through the brainstorming steps, the six journalistic questions, mind mapping, etc, and figure out their overall topic and the subtopics for their essays. In doing so, they find a couple of things they want to address, without exploring a reason to do both. A stronger thesis would be

Different breeds of dog require different training techniques; a hunting dog, like a golden retriever, will need a different training regimen than a smaller lap dog, like a bichon frise.

Note that the topics didn’t change, but it's no longer a thesis about training and breeding golden retrievers and bichon frises. Now it's a thesis that compares and contrasts training techniques for broader types of dogs.

Just because two topics are remotely related does not mean it is appropriate to write about both in the same essay. After all, the more specific you are, the further apart your different topics can become. Sometimes, you do need to broaden your topic.

Broadening to Consolidating

This does not mean you can take step after step back until you have “Dogs are interesting” as a thesis. Instead, it means recognizing you can get so specific you can't reconcile your different topics and you're left with a thesis that lists specific topics, and two essays pieced, Frankenstein-style, into one another.

Broadening happens so you can bring together similarities (or contrast differences) to specify your topic. If you're writing about dog training and dog breeding, you're writing about two broad topics. If you're writing about how to train dogs based on their different breeds, it’s probably going to be a single, solid essay. The reason for this is because you're not writing about these two topics, but instead the ways they intersect.

Just as this issue can stem from using certain words in the thesis, it can be solved by introducing other words. For example, saying you are going to compare and contrast suggests you are going to identify similarities and differences and come to a conclusion that weighs both topics against one another. Switching conjunctions can change the overall meaning: However suggests the relationship you’re identifying is based on a shift in ideas or expectations. Therefore suggests a causal relationship because one thing is one way, and the other thing directly correlates.

Conclusion

This is not to say that switching one set of conjunctions with another will solve your problems, nor is it to say that having “and” in a thesis will guarantee a bad thesis and “therefore” will guarantee a good one. The words we choose convey a lot of meaning no matter where they show up, but especially in a thesis.

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Works Cited

"AG Cody" by Rocktendo - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:AG_Cody.jpg#/media/File:AG_Cody.jpg

"Golden retriever dummytraining" by Dirk Vorderstraße - Own work. Licensed under CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Golden_retriever_dummytraining.jpg#/media/File:Golden_retriever_dummytraining.jpg

"PembrokeWelshCorgi Tryst.fullres". Licensed under CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons - http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PembrokeWelshCorgi_Tryst.fullres.jpg#/media/File:PembrokeWelshCorgi_Tryst.fullres.jpg