HW 7: Applying Graff, Chapter 3 to “My So-Called Blog”

for A Blog of One’s Own: Women and Authorship in the Digital Revolution

The purpose of this homework is to develop your ability to effectively integrate quotations into your writing, providing a “frame” for each quote and providing MLA-style in-text quotations.

After you read Emily Nussbaum’s “My So-Called Blog” (Kline 349-261) please take a position for or against the following statement: Parents should not monitor everything that their middle-school children write online.

Write a post of 150-400 words in which you explain and support your position. For evidence, you can use statements from Nussbaum’s article and your own experience.

Include one or more quotes from Nussbaum’s article that are relevant to your position. For each quote,

  1. Provide an introductory, lead-in statement to explain who is speaking and how the quote relates to your point
  2. Place the quote in quotation marks or a block quote, using the exact words of the original
  3. Provide an in-text or parenthetical citation that gives the author’s last name and the page number on which the quote was found
  4. A follow-up statement that explains why you think the quote is important and how you interpret is (what you think it means.)

Here’s an example:

I think that it’s good for kids to be able to write online without a parent monitoring everything they say. Few of us would say that children and teens shouldn’t have private conversations sometimes, no matter how disturbing parents might find some of what their kids say. Becoming your own person means making your own way in the world, and we do that through talking as much as we do physically or by learning at school. In her article, “My So-Called Blog,” Emily Nussbaum eloquently describes the social power of blogs for young people:

But the linked journals also form a community, an intriguing, unchecked experiment in silent group therapy—a hive mind in which everyone commiserates about how it feels to be an outsider, in perfect choral unison. (Kline and Burstein 351)

Sure, there’s bullying and trash talk, gossip and lies, peer pressure given a curious zombie life in the digital world. But as Nussbaum points out, but those are just white-caps on the surface of the water. Zoom out and you see the great, life-giving ocean of communication and common knowledge.

Chapter Three of They Say/I Say, “As He Himself Puts It: The Art of Quoting” (Graff 39-47) explains in detail how and why quotations should be framed in academic writing.