Paraphrasing and Quotations [A Way With Words, or Away With Words: Effect of Texting and IMing on Language]

Quotations and paraphrasing help improve an essay in many ways. It gives the author a way to support certain key points and to be objective. The essay I chose to comment on is Timothy Barranco’s “A Way With Words, or Away With Words: Effect of Texting and IMing on Language”. Throughout the essay, Barranco uses a few quotations to defend his arguments.

Barranco integrated his quotations into the essay well. The way he integrated the quotations makes the reader know not only Barranco’s perspective, but the perspective of a few other well accredited professors from various universities in the United States. In most cases, the quotes were brief. However, one of the quotations that were, in my opinion, well integrated into the text was lengthy but it served a certain purpose. He put two researchers’ (Tagliamonte and Dennis) work into the context, saying that they concluded that “Individuals pick and choose from…resources in their speech community (Tagliamonte and Dennis 27).” This quotation shows how these two researchers found that for a person to actually use “txt”, they would have to know its constituents.

Barranco also paraphrased a few scholars’ texts. Although I cannot look at the original text to judge whether or not his paraphrase is similar to the original text, I think that his paraphrases are well integrated into the essay and serve the right purpose: to provide evidence for the points he states. The paraphrase “such literary greats as E.E. Cummings…altered language to evoke its full potential (Shortis)” makes the reader know where Barranco got his information from and helps validate the writer’s points.

Quotations and paraphrases improve the validity of an essay in many ways. Above, I listed a few ways they might do that. In most cases, quotations and paraphrases increase the credibility of an essay. However, there might not be a direct correlation between the amount of paraphrases and quotations and the credibility of an essay. A reader should learn to judge whether or not an essay is objective or bias.