Anne Curzan, a professor of English at the University of Michigan, wrote an article about making citations personal. The following excerpt from her article depicts an insight she had while teaching her undergraduate students about citation. Curzan said, “This summer I’m teaching a course for incoming first-year undergraduate students, and this week we have been talking about how to cite articles in an essay responsibly. I’m not sure exactly what inspired this, but I tried a new tack. To explain how and why we introduce other people’s work into our own writing as part of creating and supporting our arguments, I talked first about how we have discussions in class.
‘How do you refer to each other when we’ve having full-class conversations?’ I asked. The students quickly came up with examples such as: ‘going off of what she said,’ ‘piggybacking off what he said,’ ‘I agree with part of what Alex said,’ and ‘I’m not sure I agree with that point.’ With these examples they could immediately see the way that they were building off each other’s ideas, including those that they didn’t fully agree with.
I then introduced the idea of academic writing as conversation: When we ask students to incorporate scholarship into their academic essays, we’re really asking them to be in conversation with what those scholars are saying. And while the introductions of quoted or paraphrased material are typically more formal than ‘going off of,’ it’s the same idea. We’re explaining how our point or interpretation relates to this published scholarship. As the students pointed out, this is a different approach for many of them than the one they adopted in high school, where they only quoted material that supported their argument—where scholars who are quoted are more back-up singers than interlocutors.” To read the entire article, please click here.