For class today, we had to read an article titled “Annoying Ways People Use Sources” by Kyle D. Stedman. This article was all about how there are different ways to properly cite a source, and sometimes people either do not know that there is a right way or they are too lazy to care. One passage that I found in this article that really stood out to me was when he said “those decisions include nitty-gritty things like introducing quotations and citing paraphrases clearly: not everyone in the entire world approaches these things the same way, but when I strategically learn the expectations of my U.S. academic audience, what I really want to say comes across smoothly, without little annoying blips in my readers’ experience”. This passage stood out to me because this is definitely something that a professional would say. Someone who was not good at putting together pieces of work would not say something like this because they would not know any better.
Another passage that really stood out to me was when Stedman stated “the easiest way to effectively massage in quotations is by purposefully returning to each one in your draft to see if you set the stage for your readers—often, by signaling that a quote is about to come, stating who the quote came from, and showing how your readers should interpret it”. I think the reason why this stood out to me was that it is a very helpful statement. I sometimes have had an issue with throwing a quote into a paper just because it is similar to what I am talking about in that paragraph at the time. It makes sense though that it is easier to understand a paper that has quotes in it when the quotes are properly introduced and not just thrown into the mix of things.
