Chapter 12: Supporting a Position with Sources

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Personal Reaction: 

Right off the bat, the authors of The Bedford Guide for College Writers explain in chapter 12 that one should not use sources just for the sake of using sources, but as a way of gaining knowledge about the subject and using what others know and say to support your point. Personally, I think this is an interesting concept. After reading about it, I have since noticed how much I learn about a topic by simply looking for sources, even though my final essay won't include information from every article or book I run across on my topic.

Professional Reaction:

The authors gave some good tips to avoid echoing others and include your own voice when paraphrasing and summarizing sources, such as choosing different words and using different sentence structures. Also, they mentioned how easy it is to have your own writing get lost in a sea of sources. While they did make some good suggestions about how to fix this problem, they said nothing about how to avoid it in the first place, which might be helpful for other writers to know. Personally, I prefer to write as much as I can about each point or each section of my paper before I integrate sources. That way, my own voice is the main focus of the paper before sources are mixed in.

Written by Hayley Leach