Monday, 08 February 2010

PREVIOUS POST
Inelegant integration and my discontents. Tomorrow morning, I will again try to teach my students how to integrate quotations into their prose. Since the last lesson failed to stick, I think I'll use one this time instead of that damnably ineffective carrot. The passages they will be trying to integrate will, therefore, not be randomly selected from books and articles relevant to their research, but passages from my dissertation which, should they mangle, will lead to their mangling. (Or so I'll say. I only hope they haven't taken my oft-repeated mockery of the thing too much to heart.) For example, I will present them with a sentence from page 94 of the dissertation, followed by four possible ways of citing it: In sum, in the late 1890s three schools of applied evolutionary thought operated simultaneously: a vitiated form of social Darwinism that only argues that the same forces which shape evolution generally also work upon human populations; a developmental teleology that points to a single cooperative (or socialist) future; and a means by which exceptional individuals could accelerate that development, such that the inevitable end becomes visible in the span of a single lifetime. Which of the following best integrates the material in that quotation? According to Scott Kaufman, who earned a doctorate and now teaches, back then there were three ways evolution worked: a "form of social Darwinism," or a "developmental teleology" of socialism, or by "accelerate that development" (S. Kaufman 94). Scott Kaufman, whose dissertation has a really long title, the entirety of which I'm quoting here, wrote a dissertation in which he argued about evolution, shape, and development, "such that the inevitable end becomes visible in the span of a single lifetime" (Scott Kaufman, The Really Long Title of His Dissertation, page 94). Experts in Nineteenth Century evolutionary theory, such as Scott Kaufman of the University of California, Irvine, argue that as the century came to a close, "three schools of applied evolutionary thought operated simultaneously: a vitiated form of social Darwinism ... a developmental teleology ... and a means by which exceptional individuals could accelerate that development" (Kaufman 94). Scott once claimed that "in the late 1890s three schools of applied evolutionary thought operated simultaneously: a vitiated form of social Darwinism that only argues that the same forces which shape evolution generally also work upon human populations; a developmental teleology that points to a single cooperative (or socialist) future; and a means by which exceptional individuals could accelerate that development, such that the inevitable end becomes visible in the span of a single lifetime" (Scott). Those are egregiously arcane on purpose: I don't want them to debate the merits of the theories, merely the manner in which they're presented. The idea is to get them to discover and discuss the logic behind a neatly integrated quotation, so that in addition to just parroting the form of a correct citation, they understand exactly why one of those sentences is superior to the others. I'm using my own dissertation purely so I can...

Become a Fan

Recent Comments