If I were asked to guest lecture this English 181 class to incoming freshman, I would feel most confident teaching them how to incorporate quotations into their writing. I feel that I have had a lot of practice integrating quotations this semester, through blog posts, in class and our research paper and that I could successfully demonstrate this skill and help them practice doing it themselves. I think that coming into this class I had a lot of experience using this skill, but now I am much more aware of how to integrate quotations successfully and how to better use the “sandwich” structure. I think that I could explain how to successfully integrate quotations to help them support their argument, like I have learned to do this semester. This skill is very important to use in papers because it gives support and validation to an argument. While this skill is very important, not many people come into college very skilled in it and I think everyone can work on this skill to do it more successfully.

In order to teach quotation integration, I would first explain why integrating quotations is important and then show them different examples, some that are done well and some that are done unsuccessfully. For each example I would ask if they thought it worked well or didn’t and why. What qualities did the well done ones have? What is missing from the ones that aren’t done as well? I would explain how to best structure the integration with an introduction and an explanation- the “sandwich” and explain how the well done ones have a structure that resembled this. I would then have them practice this skill by giving them a theme from whatever we were reading during that time and ask them to create a thesis, find a quotation that supports it and use the sandwich structure to integrate the quotation to support the thesis. I would then ask them to write it on the board and have the class discuss what makes each one successful and how to better improve each one.