Quoting the Quote

Sometimes it is daunting for a teacher to realize how often a skill has to be practiced before it becomes part of a student's toolkit. In 11th grade, we recently assigned a paper that seemed to me a straightforward exercise in passage analysis. However, the results reminded me that students need lots of guided practice before they understand what "focusing closely on a specific passage" actually looks like.

Fortunately, we have Daren and Benji on our team.

Daren and Benji have created an admirable document called "Tips for Integrating and Analyzing Quotations." It describes a couple of different approaches to working with quoted material. My favorite part of this document is the use of mnemonic phrases, for example: your evidence is not self-evident. This point emphasizes that quotations in analytic essays must always be followed by your ideas about what the quote shows. Quoted text is meant to support your argument rather than stand in for it.

Even more memorable for me has been the exortation to "quote the quote!" This catchy phrase captures the idea that one way to work with quoted text is to pull out and focus on individual words or phrases and relate them back to the idea you are trying to prove. This high focus on particular elements of quoted material is called "quoting the quote."

I have been getting a ton of mileage out of this document ever since Daren left it lying around carelessly on his desk...If you'd like to get some mileage out of it too, it is available on my teacher page (and Daren's).