Today in class, before you continue planning your group presentations, you will complete an exercise that offers you practice in some of the key moves of academic writing: (1) introducing a quotion with a signal phrase, (2) following it with a parenthetical citation, and (3) developing a paragraph by offering your own ideas on the subject of the quotation.
As model for you, I offer the sample paragraph below, which focuses on the Diego Velaszquez painting above and the Pablo Picasso painting below.
Sample Paragraph
The authors of Writing Analytically note, “There are provocative differences between Velásquez’s original and Picasso’s copy in size, spatial configuration, and palette” (Rosewasser and Stephen 268). Yet despite those differences, The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velásquez) features all of the figures in the same spirit Velásquez depicts them. Along with the painter’s canvas out of view, the artists’ foregrounding of elements ordinarily relegated to the perimeter—children, pets, servants, the artist, himself—invite a new way of seeing. Both Velásquez’s seventeenth-century baroque rendering of King Phillip IV’s court and Picasso’s cubist reassembling of it challenge viewers’ expectations of the subjects of art.
The paragraph that follows is the same as the one above, but the parenthetical citation includes only the page number because the authors are named in the signal phrase. In academic writing, whenever you quote more than one source, the authors’ names should appear either in a signal phrase or in the parenthetical citation, not both. Your analysis was an exception to this rule because your cited only one source, the text that served as your subject.
Sample Paragraph
David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephens, the authors of Writing Analytically, note, “There are provocative differences between Velásquez’s original and Picasso’s copy in size, spatial configuration, and palette” (268). Yet despite those differences, The Maids of Honor (Las Meninas, after Velásquez) features all of the figures in the same spirit Velásquez depicts them. Along with the painter’s canvas out of view, the artists’ foregrounding of elements ordinarily relegated to the perimeter—children, pets, servants, the artist, himself—invite a new way of seeing. Both Velásquez’s seventeenth-century baroque rendering of King Phillip IV’s court and Picasso’s cubist reassembling of it challenge viewers’ expectations of the subjects of art.
Directions
- As practice in three of the key moves of academic writing, use the paragraphs above as models for your own paragraph focusing on Ian Falconer’s The Competition. (See page 108.)
- Include in your paragraph a signal phrase that introduces one of the following two quotations:
“At its most serious, The New Yorker cover may speak to American history, in which New York has been a major point of entry for generations of immigrants, embracing diversity and nonconformity, while viewing the rest of the nation as more homogenous.”
“[T]he magazine is [. . .] admitting, yes America, we New Yorkers do think that we’re cooler and more individual than the rest of you, but we also know that we shouldn’t be so smug about it.”
- Follow the quotation with a parenthetical citation. If you name the authors in the signal phrase, include only the page number, 112, in the parenthetical citation. If you do not name the authors in the signal phrase, include their last names before the page number.
- Develop the paragraph with two or more sentences that offer your own reading of the magazine cover.
- Follow your paragraph with a work cited entry:
Work Cited
Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. “Arriving at an Interpretive Conclusion: Making Choices.” Writing Analytically. 9th edition, Wadsorth/Cengage, 2024. pp. 111-12.
Next Up
Wordplay Day! To prepare for class, revisit the Dictionary and World Builder pages on the Scrabble website. Also review the blog posts devoted to Scrabble tips.
Jane Lucas 