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Exercise Sheet Exercise 1: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Citing

This exercise sheet provides students with a text excerpt and asks them to paraphrase, summarize, and cite it in an essay on how the American frontier shaped U.S. development. Students must understand the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing. The excerpt describes how frontier life bred traits like coarseness, strength, inventiveness, and individualism in Americans. Students are instructed to paraphrase or summarize the entire passage and include a quotation, with proper citations. They are also asked to write a poor paraphrase and summary as an example.

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MARK FERNANDEZ
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171 views

Exercise Sheet Exercise 1: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Citing

This exercise sheet provides students with a text excerpt and asks them to paraphrase, summarize, and cite it in an essay on how the American frontier shaped U.S. development. Students must understand the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing. The excerpt describes how frontier life bred traits like coarseness, strength, inventiveness, and individualism in Americans. Students are instructed to paraphrase or summarize the entire passage and include a quotation, with proper citations. They are also asked to write a poor paraphrase and summary as an example.

Uploaded by

MARK FERNANDEZ
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Exercise Sheet

Exercise 1: Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Quoting, and Citing


The exercise below provides students with a text and asks them to paraphrase, summarize, and cite
it. The instructor must then evaluate their work. To give students more control over the assignment,
instructors can ask them to work with an Internet text of their own choosing. Students must
understand the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing before attempting the assignment.

Pretend that you are writing an essay on how the frontier experience shaped the development of
the United States. While researching, you come across the following passage written by the
historian Frederick Jackson Turner:

From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The
work of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common
traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place
of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the
frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and
strength combined with acuteness and acquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of
mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the
artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy; that dominant
individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance
which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere
because of the existence of the frontier. (Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of
the Frontier in American History,” The Frontier in American History (New York: Henry Holt
and Company, 1920), 37.)

You decide to include a paraphrase or summary of the entire passage in your essay.
Remember that a paraphrase records all the important details of a passage, and a summary
condenses a passage to the main ideas.

1. In your own words, write the best paraphrase you can of Turner’s passage. Write a
citation for your paraphrase.

2. In your own words, write the best summary you can of Turner’s passage. Write a citation for
your summary.

3. Rewrite your summary or paraphrase to include a quotation from Turner’s passage. What
is the best way to cite both the summary or paraphrase and the quotation?

4. Purposely write a poor paraphrase and summary of the above passage with poor
quotations and citations, and make a short list of the characteristics that make them poor.

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