Throughout this course, I think one of my strongest strengths I had coming in was integrating quotes into my papers. The ability to insert evidence into my paragraphs was very key for these papers, and I think I did that very well.
One thing that I think I had a lot of previous knowledge that I built on was signal phrasing. Stating your claim, the evidence your pulling from, then introducing the quote was what I knew how to do. I think that throughout the semester one thing I got a lot better at was embedded quotes. Integrating quotes into regular sentences, not sentences for the quote, is a really advanced thing to do. I think I got a lot better at that and this paper shows evidence of that.
Coming into this class, knowing how to cite quotes in papers was something I did not know how to. For the first paper I kind of knew what I was doing with it with a few mistakes. Going into paper 2 I was graded and told how to do these in text citations correctly so I got a lot better at them. Also in paper 2 I went from quoting then telling my side, without saying the authors side, to telling what the author is saying. Fully explaining quotes so that the reader understands the point you are making is crucial. I found this to be true in my papers.
Block quotations were something I did rarely but did learn a lot about in this class. I learned about the 4 lines rule that states that if a quote is over 4 lines, a block quote is necessary. This wasn’t relevant often but was useful in peer review when peer’s quotes needed a block quote.
Works cited was my least favorite part of every paper. In papers 1 and 2, I had zero clue of how to do them and sadly used Easy Bib to complete them. In paper 3 we were shown how to do them, but I still lacked confidence. I did them to the best of my ability but I think I still need work on them. They are the things I lack the most confidence in leaving this course.
