In the Project Two paper, I used Nicholas Carr and Sherry Turtle as my sources and worked with several quotes from their papers as evidence. In order to find good evidence for my paper, I reread through both of the essays and underlined quotes that I thought work work together or in contrast well. Additionally, I thought about how I would explain and respond to each of these quotes and integrate them well into my essay. One specific example of this is a quote I used from Carr and how I explained the quote in my essay. This quote and explanation states as follows…

“To Carr, this change in concentration is seen most clearly in terms of reading, stating that “Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, and begin looking for something else to do. I feel as though I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle” (Carr, 1). It is Carr’s belief that technology has had a direct effect on our ability to read, as it causes us to become distracted easier and lose concentration on the task at hand. This has resulted in a change in the human experience in an inability to read deeply and thoroughly understand the subsequent content, as well as hold concentration on one task for a lengthened period of time. To reinforce this, Carr continues by writing of how this inability to concentrate and thus read deeply is causing a new type of reading, one that involves skimming rather than fully engaging and understanding texts, as this type of reading requires less concentration by the reader.”

As you can see from this, I integrated the quote into the essay by introducing a bit about what the quote would be about by saying “To Carr, this change in concentration is seen most clearly in terms of reading, stating that…”. Additionally, I then explained what the quote was saying in order to give the reader some insight and to make sure that they were interpreting the quote in the same what that I was. Furthermore, after this quote and this explanation I supported what Carr was saying by adding in a Turkle quote that connected and backed up Carrs perspective. Finally, my selection, integration and explanation of quotes has improved greatly through this course, as during our first essay it was much more difficult for me to find and work in quotes, but now it is much simple and adds to my essays greatly.