1. In the following example, has the writer provided a good paraphrase?

Passage in source:

If one becomes famous and pursues success while affiliated with bohemia, is one then no longer a true bohemian? To qualify as bohemian, how committed need you be to a critique of bourgeois values like safety, stability, and the pursuit of material wealth?

Source:

Brouillette, Sarah. Literature and the Creative Economy. Stanford UP, 2017.

Writer’s paraphrase:

In Literature and the Creative Economy, Sarah Brouillette asks whether a bohemian who becomes well-known and chases success is no longer really a bohemian and how dedicated to attacking bourgeois values you must be to qualify as a bohemian (37).

2. In the following example, has the writer provided a good paraphrase?

Passage in source:

There is a trend in higher education to offer college credit for prior learning and demonstrated competence. Both approaches are intended to offer college students, especially nontraditional ones, faster paths to earning credits and degrees.

Source:

Neem, Johann N. What’s the Point of College? Seeking Purpose in the Age of Reform. Johns Hopkins UP, 2019.

Writer’s paraphrase:

Universities are increasingly attempting to help students move through school more quickly by taking into account previous knowledge and proven ability (Neem 83).

3. In the following example, has the writer provided a good paraphrase?

Passage in source:

Historians have meticulously documented the regimes of scientific racism that emerged alongside the transition from natural history to comparative anatomy in the late eighteenth century. However, in this same moment, the popularization of phrenology, anatomy, and physiology—as well as fields with no explicit connection to race science—created opportunities for African Americans both to critique racist science and to mobilize scientific knowledge in anti-slavery activism and adjoining forms of struggle.

Source:

Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York UP, 2017.

Writer’s paraphrase: 

Britt Rusert notes that historians have carefully recorded evidence of the scientific racism that developed in the late eighteenth century. But Rusert also observes that the popular spread of fields like phrenology provided an opening for African Americans both to criticize racist science and to use science in antislavery protests (4).

4. In the following example, has the writer provided a good paraphrase?

Passage in source:

Cognitivists, who believe the mind works like a computer, and constructivists, who emphasize the construction of mental representations, both see the textbook and the lecture as mere information transmission. They understand reading a textbook or attending a lecture to be actually discouraging deep processing or active knowledge construction. But it is not so simple. A lecture is much more than an information dump, and a textbook is not just inert content.

Source:

Friesen, Norm. The Textbook and the Lecture: Education in the Age of New Media. Johns Hopkins UP, 2017.

Writer’s paraphrase: 

According to Norm Friesen, the biases of some thinkers about the way the mind works prevent them from understanding what truly goes on when we consume a text or listen to a presentation (7). 

5. In the following example, has the writer provided a good paraphrase?

Passage in source:

One finds textual negotiation as an ecopoetic motif woven throughout English Renaissance literature: over and over again, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers express frustration, surprise, impatience, and inventiveness as they confront the affordances of various ecological materials in textual form. At times, the animal, plant, or mineral materials used to make texts are taken to be affective, as when Thomas Dekker and George Wilkins describe a writer so filled with vitriol that his words should appear on “paper made of the filthy linnen rags that had beene wrapt about the infected and vlcerous bodyes of beggars, that had dyed in a ditch of the pestilence.”

Source:

Calhoun, Joshua. The Nature of the Page: Poetry, Papermaking, and the Ecology of Texts in Renaissance England. U of Pennsylvania P, 2020.

Writer’s paraphrase: 

Authors of Renaissance texts comment in various ways about the origins of materials used for writing—articulating, for example, their anger about using paper recycled from deceased mendicants (Calhoun 2). 

6. In the following example, has the writer credited the reference source properly?

Passage in source:

Viet Thanh Nguyen . . . is a Vietnamese-American novelist. He is the Aerol Arnold Chair of English and Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction among other accolades. . . . Nguyen was born in Ban Me Thuot, Vietnam in 1971, the son of refugees from North Vietnam who moved south in 1954. After the fall of Saigon, in 1975, his family fled to the United States. . . . He often enjoyed reading literature about the Vietnam War. . . .

Source:

“Viet Thanh Nguyen.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 3 July 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viet_Thanh_Nguyen.

Writer’s passage:

Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam in 1971. He moved to the United States with his family in 1975 and as a young person liked to read about the Vietnam War (“Viet Thanh Nguyen”). Currently a professor at the University of Southern California, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel, The Sympathizer.

7. In the following example, has the writer credited the reference source sufficiently?

Passage in source:

Mount Rushmore National Memorial, colossal sculpture in the Black Hills of southwestern South Dakota, U.S. It lies about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Rapid City, 10 miles (16 km) northeast of Custer, and just north of Custer State Park. Huge representations of the heads of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, each about 60 feet (18 metres) tall, are carved in granite on the southeast side of Mount Rushmore. The mountain itself, at an elevation of 5,725 feet (1,745 metres), was named in 1885 for Charles E. Rushmore, a New York lawyer. The memorial, which covers 2 square miles (5 square km), was designated in 1925 and dedicated in 1927. The U.S. National Park Service (NPS) assumed administration of the site in 1933.

Source:

Pletcher, Kenneth. “Mount Rushmore National Memorial.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2020, britannica.com/topic/Mount-Rushmore-National-Memorial.

Writer’s passage:

Mount Rushmore, a sculpture in South Dakota’s Black Hills, depicts the heads for four former presidents of the United States: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln.

8. In the following example, has the writer credited the reference source sufficiently?

Passage in source:

Cormac McCarthy . . . is an American novelist, playwright, short-story writer, and screenwriter. He has written three short-stories, two plays, two screenplays, and ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres. . . . For purposes of his writing career, McCarthy decided to change his first name from Charles to Cormac to avoid confusion, and comparison, with famous ventriloquist Edgar Bergen’s dummy Charlie McCarthy. . . . McCarthy . . . received widespread recognition after the publication of All the Pretty Horses (1992), when it won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It became a New York Times bestseller, selling 190,000 hardcover copies within the six months. It was followed by The Crossing (1994) and Cities of the Plain (1998), completing the Border Trilogy. In the midst of this trilogy came, The Stonemason (first performed in 1995), his second dramatic work.

Source:

“Cormac McCarthy.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 July 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cormac_McCarthy.

Writer’s passage:

Cormac McCarthy, an American writer, is the author of All the Pretty Horses, winner of the National Book Award. McCarthy’s first name was originally Charles, but he changed it to Cormac so that people would not mix him up with Charlie McCarthy, the dummy of the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen.

9. The following sentence is from page 10 of Catherine Fletcher’s The Beauty and the Terror: The Italian Renaissance and the Rise of the West (Oxford UP, 2020):

The culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy—and the city of Florence in particular—left a substantial legacy in the world of the arts, education and political thought.

Below, a writer has quoted the sentence. Is this approach acceptable?

Catherine Fletcher, writing about the Italian Renaissance, remarks, “The culture of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Italy—and the city of Florence in particular—left a substantial legacy in the world of the arts, education and political thought” (10).

10. The following sentence is from page 1 of Tim Watson’s Culture Writing: Literature and Anthropology in the Midcentury Atlantic World (Oxford UP, 2018):

Literature, literary studies, and anthropology have been mutually intertwined since the nineteenth century, when they began to take their modern forms almost simultaneously and under the direct influence of each other.

Below, a writer has quoted the sentence. Is this approach acceptable?

In Culture Writing, Tim Watson writes about the historical relation among fields often thought to be separate. “Literature, literary studies, and anthropology have been mutually intertwined since the nineteenth century, when they began to take their modern forms almost simultaneously and under the direct influence of each other” (1).

11. The following passage is from page 5 of Victoria Kahn’s The Trouble with Literature (Oxford UP, 2020): 

The first version of the twentieth-century trouble with literature is best articulated by the Russian formalist notion of literariness.

If a writer wants to explain what the author sees as a problem with literature in the twentieth century, would the following be the best way to quote from the passage? 

Victoria Kahn describes one literary problem of the twentieth century: “The first version of the twentieth-century trouble with literature is best articulated by the Russian formalist notion of literariness” (5).

12. The following passage is from page 1 of Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (Harvard UP, 2020): 

Always dubious if never entirely unappealing, the gimmick wears multiple faces. It can be a catchy hook, a timework joke, a labor-saving contraption. In the studies that follow, we will encounter it in even more specific guises: as a smiley face, a financial strategy, a readymade artwork that interprets itself. Gimmicks are fundamentally one thing across these instances: overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) but also as working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).

If a writer wants to explain what Ngai means by a gimmick, would the following be a good way to quote from the passage? 

Sianne Ngai’s book explores the notion of gimmicks—that is, “overrated devices that strike us as working too little . . . but also as working too hard” (1).

13. The following sentence is from page 21 of Joseph North’s Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History (Harvard UP, 2017): 

For Gerald Graff, who takes the relevant period as extending from 1875 to 1915, the conflict is between “investigators” and “generalists”: between those who stood for “scientific research and the philological study of modern languages” on the one hand, and the “dissenting tradition” of those who “defended appreciation over investigation and the values of facts” on the other.²

Below, a writer has quoted the source. Is this approach acceptable?

Joseph North cites Gerald Graff to explain the origins of modern literary criticism. “For Gerald Graff, who takes the relevant period as extending from 1875 to 1915, the conflict is between “investigators” and “generalists”: between those who stood for “scientific research and the philological study of modern languages” on the one hand, and the “dissenting tradition” of those who “defended appreciation over investigation and the values of facts” on the other.²” (21).

14. The following sentence is from page 11 of Véronique Lane’s The French Genealogy of the Beat Generation: Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac’s Appropriations of Modern Literature, from Rimbaud to Michaux (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017):

In other words, as an historical term, functional from 1945 to 1960, “the Beat Generation” was founded on an engagement with French texts.¹⁴

Below, a writer has quoted the source. Is this approach acceptable?

Véronique Lane notes that “as an historical term, functional from 1945 to 1960, ‘the Beat Generation’ was founded on an engagement with French texts” (11).