One hallmark of advanced writing is the effectiveness with which one uses another person's words and ideas. There are three ways to accomplish this: summary, paraphrase, and direct quote. To summarize or paraphrase means to keep the author's ideas but to reconstruct them in your own language, syntax, and voice (while giving attribution to the original author, of course). To directly quote a source is to keep the author's ideas and words (if the language is vivid enough to be worth keeping). However, when using a direct quote, writers should avoid free-standing quotes (also known as dropped, floating, or cut-and-pasted quotes). A free-standing quote is a quote that a writer uses without introduction or integration, and it will disrupt the writer's own tone and flow.
There are three ways of introducing quotes to prevent them from being free-standing.
1. Use a simple introductory phrase, like "According to" or "So-and-so argues." This method emphasizes the author, so a writer would use this when he or she wants to emphasize the person as an expert or someone offering testimony.
Here's an example.
According to Siegfried Kracauer, "While time is not part of the photograph like the smile or the chignon, the photograph itself, so it seems to them, is a representation of time" (424).
2. Write your own sentence, then use a quote (introduced with a colon) that functions as evidence or demonstration of your sentence's ideas. Be sure your sentence is a complete sentence; otherwise, the sentence becomes a fragment. This method works most effectively for using source material as evidence for the writer's own claims.
Here's an example.
In certain ways, a photograph functions as a more reliable witness than our own memory: "Memory encompasses neither the entire spatial appearance nor the entire temporal course of an event. Compared to photography memory's records are full of gaps" (Kracauer 425).
3. Instead of introducing the entire quote, integrate pieces (words, phrases, or clauses) into the context of the writer's own syntax. This method works best to synthesize ideas and to create a smooth flow.
Here's an example.
When we reduce our experience of the world to collecting photographs, we become guilty of the "warehousing of nature" (Kracauer 435) and loved ones in dusty albums as forgotten souvenirs.
Your assignment:
A. Find three quotes from Susan Sontag's On Photography that you could use in your essay.
B. Introduce those quotes and/or incorporate them into a sentence of your own that you could use in your essay.
C. Post those three sentences to the blog.
According to Susan Sontag, “A way of certifying experience, take photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir”(9).
ReplyDeleteStated in the book "On Photography", “Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness”(Sontag 8).
Susan Sontag, author of "On Photography", states that, “Photographs images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire”(4).
Kaitlyn, these aren't quite right. You've mastered the #1 type as described in the post, but you haven't used the second or third technique.
DeleteIn Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), she states that photography “offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others¬–allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation” (p. 167).
ReplyDeleteSontag (1977) describes photography as the “anthology of images” which allows individuals to “hold the whole world in [their] heads” (p. 3).
One reason why people take photographs is to capture an experience they do not want to forget: “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened” (Sontag, 1977, p. 5).
Perfect!
Delete1.In Susan Sontag’s book “On Photography” she states,”…it is common to have many photographs of oneself, the camera offering the possibility of possessing a complete record, at all ages” (p. 165).
ReplyDelete2.According to Sontag, “as we make images and consume them, we need still more images; and still more” (p. 179).
3.Impatient American’s love photography: “’Speed is at the bottom of it all,’ as Hart Crane said (writing about Stieglitz in 1923), ‘the hundredth of a second caught so precisely that the motion is continued from the picture indefinitely: the moment made eternal’” (p. 65).
Danielle, your first and second examples are of the same model.
Delete1. According to Sontag, "To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality, vulnerability, mutability" (p. 15).
ReplyDelete2. In Susan Sontag's book "On Photography" she states, "Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted" (p. 24).
3. Sontag (1977) describes photographs as messages which are "both transparent and mysterious" (p. 111).
Ryen, you're missing the second type as described in the blog post.
Delete1. Photography imposes alienation between the individual and humanity as there has to be distance between photographer and subject: "the camera doesn't rape, or even possess, though it may presume, intrude, trespass, distort, exploit, and at the farthest reach of metaphor, assassinate- all activities that, unlike the sexual push and shove, can be conducted from a distance, and with some detachment (Sontag, 13)."
ReplyDelete2. When exploring the idea of reaffirming connection between the individual and humanity, we need to look at Steichen's exhibit "Family of Man"; he "set up the show to make it possible for each viewer to identify with a great many of the people depicted and, potentially, with the subject of every photograph: citizens of World Photography all (Sontag, 32)."
3. When comparing both shows, "the Steichen show was an up and the Arbus show was a down, but either experience serves equally well to rule out a historical understanding of reality (Sontag, 33)."
Laura, these are correct except for your quotation marks, which should go before the parenthetical citation. For example, your last quote should end . . . reality" (Sontag 33).
Delete1. According to Sontag’s opinion on modern art, “photographs make a compassionate response feel irrelevant. The point is not to be upset, but to be able to confront the horrible with equanimity” (4). Sontag’s belief that equanimity is the point of modern art displays utter detachment of an instinctive reaction. This detachment is a cause for alienation between subject and photographer.
ReplyDelete2. Photographs are a means to connect with a lost world. They introduce the consumer to an unknown perspective were captured ‘slices of the world’ (Sontag 69) beguiled a new generation, culture, and society.
3. Connectedness is a means to relate to the unknown and these connections allow a deeper understanding of the past: “Like the collector, the photographer is animated by a passion that, even when it appears to be for the present, is linked to a sense of the past” (Sontag 77).
Nice work, Chyna. Just use double quotes for "slices of the world."
DeleteIn Sontag’s, “On Photography”, she states, “To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, light weight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store” (3).
ReplyDeleteAccording to Susan Sontag, “While old photographs fill out our mental image of the past, the photographs being taken now transform what is present into a mental image, like the past” (167).
Sontag argues, “Photography, which has so many narcissistic uses, is also a powerful instrument for depersonalizing our relation to the world…” (167).
Rebecca, you're just repeating three examples of the same type (#1 above). Work on using the second and third types of introducing quotes.
Delete1. While comparing Steichen's and Arbus's photography Sontag provides that, "One does so by universalizing the human condition, into joy; the other by atomizing it, into horror” (33).
ReplyDelete2. In "On Photography" Sontag states, “Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when were shown a photograph of it” (5).
3. Susan Sontag argues “the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality…” (57).
Hannah, you're missing the second type as described in the blog post.
Delete1. According to Susan Sontag, “to photograph is to confer importance” (p.28).
ReplyDelete2. In Sontag’s, “On Photography”, she states, “photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote” (p.163).
3. Susan Sontag argues “photography inevitably entails a certain patronizing of reality..” (p.80).
Alexis, you're just repeating three examples of the first type. Work on using the second and third types of incorporating quotes.
Delete1. According to Susan Sontag," to photograph is to confer importance. There is probably no subject that cannot be beautified; moreover, there is no way to suppress the tendency inherent in all photographs to accord value to their subjects"( pg. 28).
ReplyDelete2. Many people consider themselves as photographers: ""some photographers set up as scientist, others as moralists", which implies that anybody can make art(pg.59).
3.Photographs allow us to remember the past and also look into the future, some "photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality"(pg.71) that we individually cherish.
Nice work, Beatriz. If you're using MLA, then cut the "pg." For your last sentence, begin with "Because" to keep the sentence from becoming a comma splice.
DeleteAccording to Susan Sontag, "there can be no evidence, photographic or otherwise, of an event until the event itself has been named and characterized" (p.19).
ReplyDeleteIn Sontag's book, "On Photography" she states photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe" (p.3).
Sontag describes photographs as "a quotation, which makes a book of photographs like a book of quotations" (p.71).
Mary, you're giving three examples of the first type. Work on incorporating quotes using the second and third method as well.
Delete1. As stated by Susan Sontag, “Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt” (15).
ReplyDelete2. In the same manner that a photograph can allow the viewer to depict a sense of isolationism, it can also inflict a feeling of togetherness as well, between the viewer and humankind. This can be seen in Steichen’s “Family of Man” exhibit: “Steichen set up the show to make it possible for each viewer to identify with a great many of the depicted and, potentially, with the subject of every photograph” (Sontag, 32).
3. Sontag affirms that “picture-taking is both a limitless technique for appropriating the objective world and an unavoidable solipsistic expression of the singular self” (122).
Andrea, work on the third method. You've got the first and second types.
Delete1. "Contrary to what is suggested by the humanist claims made for photography, the camera’s ability to transform reality into something beautiful derives from its relative weakness as a means of conveying truth” (Sontag, 111). Photographs are only a fragment of time, viewers aren’t able to see the before or after and are only able to see what one wants to let you see, it’s for these reasons that photographs also alienate the individual from humanity.
ReplyDelete2. Although most photographs are used to show beauty, Sontag says it best when she said “The camera can be lenient; it is also expert at being cruel” (Sontag, 104).
3. Photographs are in a sense, a way to prove that a moment in time happened, that one really experienced those emotions, that journey, that that fragment in time really occurred. “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened" (Sontag, 5).
Katelyn, watch out for floating (aka "dropped" or "free-standing") quotes. These are quotes that stand alone in an essay; these quotes need to be introduced and/incorporated into the actual sentence. Read the original post again. Your second sentence is a solid example of the first method of introducing quotes, but you need to use the second and third methods as well.
Delete1. In her essay "Melancholy Objects," Susan Sontag (1977) describes photography as "a quotation, which makes a book of photographs like a book of quotations" (p.71).
ReplyDelete2. In the earliest years of the art, photography was most often used as a way of memorializing achievements and milestones: "For at least a century, the wedding photograph has been as much a part of the ceremony as the prescribed verbal formulas" (Sontag, 1977, p.8).
3. Sontag (1977) explains that while photography is a way of "certifying experience," it can also limit experiences as people take more time to "search for the photogenic" than they do being fully immersed in the experience itself (p. 9).
Nice work, Krista.
DeleteAccording to Sontag, the reason people take pictures is because they are a version of solitaire soul who discovers a place in this world in far more extremes that are visible to the naked eye (55).
ReplyDeleteIn many ways photographers believe that they are showing the accuracy behind images that us humans often don’t see: “photographers assume that their work can convey some kind of stable meaning” (106).
When we supposed we have seen it all and known more than enough we find these photographs which allow us to see the “reality as we had not seen it before” (119).
Nice work, Jaqueline.
DeleteSusan Sontag (1977) simply explains that "to photograph is to confer importance" (p. 28).
ReplyDeleteA photograph is a treasured timepiece: "Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt" (Sontag, 1977, p. 42)
Sontag (1977) describes an advantage of photography as "a privileged moment" that a person is able to "keep and look at again" (p. 18).
Nice work, Dannon.
DeleteIn Susan Sontag’s On Photography (1977), she states that photographs are, “artifacts, but their appeal is that they also seem, in a world littered with photographic relics, to have the status of found objects- unpremeditated slices of the world” (pg. 69).
ReplyDeleteSontag (1977) claims that “Instead of just recording reality” photographs have converted the custom for the way landscapes or objects look to us, “thereby changing the very idea of reality, and of realism” (pg. 87).
Society tends to use photography to capture a moment, so that it can never be forgotten, but will forever be stuck in the past, “ A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence” (Sontag, 1977, pg.16).
Nice work, Lulu, but in your last sentence, there should be a colon instead of a comma after "past."
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you're using APA, just use "p" instead of "pg."
Susan Sontag states, “Knowing a great deal about what is in the world through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing” (168).
ReplyDeleteAccording to Susan Sontag, photography “offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others… allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation” (167).
Sontag states, “The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own” (57).
According to Susan Sontang, “a photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence” (16).
ReplyDeletePhotographs can open our eyes to details we have missed at the moment the snapshot was taken. They also transport us to places unimaginable: “Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic” (110).
Photographs have no language, they can be understood by mostly anybody. Photographs “render history and politics irrelevant” (33).
1. From packing, boarding on the plane, while on the flight, on the bus, eating, my hotel rooms, and anything intriguing because “photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made.” (Sontag 9).
ReplyDelete2. According to Susan Sontag, “Photography implies that we know about the world if we accept it as the camera records it. But this is the opposite of understanding, which starts from not accepting the world as it looks” (23).
3. Crime scene photographers are there to only take pictures and not to interfere with an investigation: “The photographer was thought to be an acute but noninterfering observer—a scribe, not a poet.” (Sontag 88).
One of the reasons of which people take photographs is to capture a moment they don’t ever want to forget about because “A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened” (Sontag, 1977, p. 5).
ReplyDeleteMany people view themselves as photographers: "some photographers set up as scientist, others as moralists", which implies that anybody can make art(pg.59).
In Susan Sontag’s essay she mentions that photography “offers, in one easy, habit-forming activity, both participation and alienation in our own lives and those of others¬–allowing us to participate, while confirming alienation” (p. 167).