Integrating quotes has been a significant challenge for me in this course since I have barely been exposed to quoting passages in text. On top of that the specific way we were taught to integrate quotes in this class was totally new to me. It also didn’t help that the points that I tried to argue never totally agreed with any one piece that we read and sometimes even were polar opposite of some of the sources I tried to quote. One example of a quote I organized in my text was a quote from Galen Strawson which in summary says that life doesn’t have a narrative structure and that it shouldn’t be described as such which also introduced the idea as life as “great shambles” which I tied into my idea of life as chaos. I ended up using the quote after I introduced my idea of life being a form of chaos to back up my ideas with the similar ideas of a respected linguist therefore giving myself some credibility. My second quote that I used in my example paper used a passage from Julie Beck to back up my claim that viewing or describing life as a nutritive can be beneficial. I cited a passage from her that described the results of a study which found that when people their life story as one that has redemptive arcs (things will get better) they end up being in a higher overall state of well being compared to those who do not. I used this quote to back up my claim that narrative structure can be beneficial if used in the right way with a credible source which by association made my claim more credible.
