Quote Sandwiches

Objective: Teaching students how to properly frame quotation to support their own ideas and add to their argument or thesis instead of just plop in on the party.

Lecture Directions:

Give the students a bit of vocabulary to work with. The sandwich metaphor is nice and students immediately understand statements like “you’re lacking top bread” or “your meat and veggies are a little off of your bread” which save you time writing on their essays explaining how they need to better support quotes and how to do it.
To break up the lecture portion, asks students to provide more templates of their own either by calling them out to write on the board or do a quick free write and share.

Terminology:

Top Bread—the introduction of the quotation. This includes the author introductory sentence such as In his article, “The Importance of Writing Badly,” Bruce Ballenger describes his take on the beginnings of the writing process. As well as the quotation introduction, which could follow a number of templates like the following:

X states, “______”

According to X, “______”

X himself writes, “______”

In her book, ______, X maintains that “______”

The Meat & Veggies—the actual quotation being used.

Bottom Bread—What the writer gathers from the quotation. This is the part most students of writing forget about, so emphasize that the explanation of why the quote is important to their own argument is very, very important to completing a quote sandwich. Possibly templates for bottom bread look like the following:

Basically, X is saying ______

In other words, X believes ______

X is insisting that ______

The essence of X’s argument is that ______

After giving your students the terminology for framing a quote, it’s time to start acting and practicing, because practice makes perfect!

Activity Directions:

Find a source text that uses quotations to further it’s own point but doesn’t frame the quotation like formal writing should. Newspaper articles are perfect, so grabbing some newspapers from that day would be perfect. Magazines are great too.
Also provide the students with a paragraph that does frame a quotation well. I’ve provided one with this activity sheet sourced from a 101 student’s Unit One essay.
Asks students to quickly read the article, and find places where there are quotations left unsupported. Your advanced students will find these spots quickly, so be sure to share and point out these sections with the entire class.
Then ask the students to read the paragraph that is well supported.
Make a list on the board of the ways the newspaper article’s author still needs to support their quotation by comparing it to the essay paragraph.
After the class has a nice sized list on the board it’s time to start writing!

Writing Prompt:

As discussed just now in class, the way these newspaper articles use quotations won’t fly in an essay. Pick out one paragraph you think you can add some commentary on or can see a way to add the top bread, bottom bread, or meat and veggies in order to make it function well as a paragraph in an essay. Using what the author provides you, rewrite this paragraph so it can be a successful aspect of an essay.

Quote Sandwich Example Paragraph:

Not every single piece of writing may be perfect or have a purpose or function. But, sometimes those pieces may lead to a bigger, better piece of writing. In his essay, “The Importance of Writing Badly,” Bruce Ballenger says, “Giving myself permission to write badly makes it much more likely that I will write what I don’t expect to write, and that from those surprises will come some of my best writing” (Ballenger 1). It usually takes me at least a couple of rough drafts before I feel comfortable and confident in my writing. I “write badly” in rough drafts because I don’t pay close attention to conventions or sentence structure. I just try to get the main ideas and the beginning of a body written down in a rough draft. Then I go back and revise the rough drafts to polish off the writing. All of those rough drafts add together to make one final, hopefully good piece of writing.

Tweaking this Activity:

If students have a draft that incorporates some form of outside sources, ask them to bring drafts to class and instead of using the newspapers or articles simply give writing time for everyone to revise a paragraph to create the perfect or ideal quote sandwich. I used this activity and you’d be amazed at what this can do to improve the usage of outside sources.

Source:

Graff, Gerald, and Cathy Birkenstein. They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in

Academic Writing. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.