Take Home Quiz: Paraphrasing and Quoting
The following links describe paraphrasing and offer some instructions and advice. Once you've read them, proceed to the exercises below.
http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/QPA_paraphrase2.html
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/print/research/r_paraphr.html
He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetuate it. –Martin Luther King Jr.
Paraphrase: People who see unethical things being done to others but who fail to intervene (when they are able to intervene) are as unethical as those who are causing the harm in the first place.
Every effort to confine Americanism to a single pattern, to constrain it to a single formula, is disloyalty to everything that is valid in Americanism. –Henry Steele Commager
Paraphrase: There is no “right way” to be an American. When everyone in America is expected to think within one belief system, when people are ostracized or persecuted for thinking autonomously, when people are labeled “UnAmerican” for independent thinking, the only legitimate definition of “true American” is destroyed.
Now offer a paraphrase of one of the following quotes. Try not to use the same words that appear in the original, and remember that your goal is to explain what the quote really means. Think of yourself as finishing the sentence, “In other words….”
Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
A stupid man's report of what a clever man says can never be accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.
Bertrand Russell
Now paraphrase TWO of these longer quotes:
Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship ...Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. –Hermann Goering, Luftwaffe Commander, Nuremberg Trials 1946, from Nuremberg Diary by G M Gilbert (Signet, New York, 1947)
The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then—the very world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer “object,” not a fixed and finished “datum” from which all subjects and subjective qualities could be pared away, but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality.” David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
To touch the coarse skin of a tree is thus, at the same time, to experience one’s own tactility, to feel oneself touched by the tree. And to see the world is also, at the same time, to experience oneself as visible, to feel oneself seen. Clearly, a wholly immaterial mind could neither see things nor touch things—indeed, could not experience anything at all. We can experience things—can touch, hear, and taste things—only because, as bodies, we are ourselves included in the sensible field, and have our own textures, sounds, and tastes. We can perceive things at all only because we ourselves are entirely a part of the sensible world that we perceive! We might as well say that we are organs of this world, flesh of its flesh, and that the world is perceiving itself through us. David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Quote Exercise #1: Write a short paragraph in which you incorporate smoothly and correctly one of the following quotes.
Only sick music makes money today.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I am at two with nature.
Woody Allen
Drive thy business or it will drive thee.
Benjamin Franklin
A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject.
Sir Winston Churchill
Democracy is a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve.
George Bernard Shaw
Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.
Henry David Thoreau
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.
Aldous Huxley
In one sense nature is neither for nor against what have come to be human ideals. She includes both what we call good and what we call evil.
Joseph Wood Krutch, The Voice of the Desert
A long habit of thinking a thing not wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.
Thomas Paine, from Common Sense
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want rain without thunder and lightning.
Frederick Douglas
Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?
Joseph Stalin