If I were approached to guest lecture in the next section of this 181 course, I’d feel confident teaching incoming freshmen what I know about integrating quotes into writing. This particular topic is one that I have always thought myself to be good at, whether it be introducing quotes for analysis or using quotes to support my arguments. The latter of the two is a method that not many incoming freshmen are familiar with, but it’s always been my default method of quote integration. Personally, I feel there are times and places for quote analysis, and times where quotes can speak for themselves and help build an argument. Where scientific evidence is concerned, it must be interpreted before it can be used as a building block for argumentative purposes. When a point has been made and a quote is simply a clear example of the argument in the text under question, I think it is plausible that the quote can be used to build an argument without being restated and analyzed as thoroughly.

To teach this lesson to incoming freshmen, I’d plan a group activity. First, I’d introduce the different methods of quote integration that we learned in class. Then, I’d assign each group a thesis statement regarding a text that the class has read (assuming the syllabus would be the same as this semester, I’d likely choose Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story). I’d ask each group to write multiple paragraphs supporting the thesis using direct quotes from the novel, in each paragraph integrating the quotes differently. One paragraph should introduce quotes then analyze their meaning in order to support the thesis, while another paragraph should integrate quotes in the writing in order to build the argument of the thesis. I would then ask all the groups to pick their favorite paragraph to read to the class, explain which method of quote integration they used, and why they preferred it to other methods.

In my cover letter, I would like to explore in particular the artifacts that led me to developing the larger components of my final portfolio. My primary considerations are my blog posts regarding the Staten Island bar scene of Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (blog post #2), the Grey’s Anatomy ad as my Pecha Kucha artifact (blog post #3), the literary analysis letter and reflection, and choosing Super Sad True Love Story to be my literary text for my final paper (blog post #7).

I have chosen to focus on Learning Outcome #3:Writing as Process in this blog post. My researched argument has already undergone an editing process, from proposal to rough draft to (soon to be) final. My proposal became an outline before it became a rough draft, and the rough draft underwent a reverse outlining process during peer editing in class. This process was extremely helpful, as when I tend to compose rough drafts, my paragraphs tend to run on until they run out of directions to go in, rather than ending and starting new paragraphs every time I switch directions. Yes, informal kinds of writing managed to sneak into the process. I’ve talked out my paper ideas with friends who were unfamiliar with the text in order to get the opinions of unbiased, uninformed audience members. They weren’t much help as to interpreting the text, but I was able to figure out how to tackle the part of the paper regarding technology’s influence on social interaction with the help of outside opinions. Ultimately, I intend my final paper to be the best product of my previous drafts possible, and I continue to use all the available tools to produce this work.

I have chosen to focus on the conclusion of the novel Arrowsmith, written by Sinclair Lewis and originally published in 1925 by Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. This work of fiction follows aspiring doctor, Martin Arrowsmith, through his medical school education and career as a doctor. Arrowsmith’s early career took him all over the country, from the Midwest to the Caribbean Islands to New York to his final location, the wilderness of Vermont. Other characters in this novel also travel quite a bit as required by their professions, and they often unexpectedly run into Arrowsmith. The conclusion of this novel is very satisfying, for a few reasons. First of all, it informs readers of the whereabouts of all the important characters in relation to Arrowsmith at the book’s close. For example, old professors of Arrowsmith’s are at new institutions, and his old classmates have blossoming careers. Readers are also aware of the location of Arrowsmith, and how he is currently occupying his time. Secondly, the conclusion of the book refers back to the introduction. A professor told Arrowsmith on the first day of medical school, in the first chapter of the book, that a true medical student must know how to “wait and doubt” (Lewis, pg. 15) during scientific experimentation. The last line of the book is Arrowsmith saying to his companion, “maybe we’ll get something permanent-and probably we’ll fail” (Lewis, pg. 430). Readers get attached to Arrowsmith throughout the novel, and knowing that he ends up where he always wanted to be, a “true student” in the eyes of his mentor, is very pleasing. Tying my introduction and conclusion together is obviously a technique I’d like to incorporate while writing my final paper, as is informing the reader of the fate of the characters mentioned and of the society in question as a whole.

1. Introduction:
2. Background information about Gary Shteyngart’s novel, Super Sad True Love Story, published by Random House in 2010
3. Establish the dystopian universe as entirely dependent on technology (society has been completely shaped by it)
4. Identify parallels between SSTLS society and current world
5. Introduce Lenny and Eunice
6. Two people that are completely different: Age, intelligence, race, lifestyle, etc.
7. Emphasize the difference in Lenny and Eunice’s dependence on technology as a life supplement rather than a distraction from the real world
8. Their relationship has helped them find happiness in their screwed up society
9. Make claim that Lenny and Eunice’s relationship was completely fabricated by the technology available in their era, followed by summary of departments that will be used to prove this theory
10. Influence of technology on social interactions and relationships in the real world, and how Lenny and Eunice’s relationship was created as a manifestation of technology
11. How the SSTLS universe shapes individuals to be defined by technology, how Lenny and Eunice’s relationship was controlled by technology and authority figures from beginning to end
12. Influence of technology…
13. …On social interactions
14. Alač, Morana. “Moving Android: On Social Robots and Body-in-Interaction.” Social Studies of Science4 (2009): 491-528. JSTOR. Web. 24 Oct. 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/27793307.
15. Lenny and Eunice’s relationship was both developed and destroyed by technology, and that even their most intimate moments were nothing but technological creations.
16. …On relationships
17. Technology inhibits our ability to form intimate relationships.
18. No relationship formed in this society can exist without being influenced by technology.
19. Lenny and Eunice’s relationship was created as a manifestation of this Lenny and Eunice are very different people.
20. Quotes from SSTLS
21. “…He would get all intro on me…but he couldn’t.” (pg. 44)
22. Ben and Eunice went to Lucca. Whenever Eunice insulted Ben, he turned off his äppärät community so she couldn’t see what he was thinking, and after hooked up, Eunice had a breakdown and Ben tried to calm her down by saying she looked slutty and had a high fuckability ranking. Technological advances hinder even simple social interactions between humans.
23. “I still have…for easy reference.” (pg. 50-51)
24. Lenny is old school, as he prefers paper lists to technology
25. “Eunice Park is sitting…close to her.” (pg. 99)
26. Even though this is the first time Lenny and Eunice have seen each other since Rome, they are not interacting with each other. Lenny is writing in his diary about Eunice and Eunice is shopping on her äppärät. Here again we see the age/technological difference between Lenny and Eunice

III. How the SSTLS universe shapes individuals to be defined by technology

1. Technology plays a key role in the dystopic society’s everyday life
2. From constant äppärät interaction with total strangers to credit poles displaying financial information on city streets (pg. 54-55), it is impossible to escape the wrath of technology. It isn’t unusual to wonder how anyone can form truly meaningful relationships in a world filled with public “fuckability” rankings and where people have their heads in their äppäräts.
3. Behe, Rege. “Gary Shteyngart’s ‘Super Sad True Love Story’ Matches Low-Tech, Digital Age.” ProQuest. McClatchy-Tribune Business News, 22 Aug. 2010. http://search.proquest.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/docview/746340947/fulltext/D947BCDCED2041A0PQ/3?accountid=10747. 24 Oct. 2015.
4. This article briefly elaborates on society’s view of books in comparison to technology, and how Lenny and Eunice’s relationship has been impacted by these views. This article can expand my argument that the relationship between Lenny and Eunice was created by technology. By showing that all of society is implicated in the web of technology too thoroughly to form lasting relationships, it will prove that Lenny and Eunice are no exception.
5. Lenny and Eunice’s relationship was controlled by technology and authority figures from beginning to end
6. Quotes from SSTLS
7. “I was looking for clues…savior of a beaten girl.” (pg. 37-39)
8. Lenny’s detailed internet stalking of Eunice
   2. “By reading this sign you have denied existence of the object and                                    implied consent.” (pg. 43, 81)
9. This common saying is everywhere. At the end of announcements and bulletins, this commandment from the                                                          American Restoration Authority is just another way of reminding                                       individuals who is in charge.
10. Staten Island Bar scene (pg. 81-94)
11. Closing
12. Reiterate that Lenny and Eunice’s relationship initially appeared to exist despite the wide and far reach of technology, but in truth simply a product of the dystopic society’s technological advances.
13. The influence of technology on social interactions and relationships was unavoidable
14. “So What”: The shortcomings of this dystopic universe, as far as technology is concerned, are not imagined, but emphasized issues that are present in today’s society.

For Blog Post #5, I quoted scenes from Gary Shteyngart’s novel, Super Sad True Love Story, which is considered my “primary source” for my final paper. I made references to specific parts of the novel, such as the credit poles on pages 54-55, internet stalking on pages 37-39, and the Staten Island bar scene on pages 90-92. I used these quotations to extend my arguments about surveillance in our current society after introducing the relevance of the novel itself to the topic. I included brief explanations of each scene and how they related to the position I was arguing. Rephrasing these quotations from Super Sad True Love Story is difficult using the templates on pages 46-47 of They Say, I Say, as those appear to be primarily for gathering evidence and arguments from texts. According to Lenny, “the old Chinese woman had a decent 1400 [credit score], but others, the young Latina mothers, even a profligate teenaged Hasid puffing down the street, were showing blinking red scores below 900, and I was worried for them” (Shteyngart, pg. 54).

For Blog Post #6, I analyzed Jessica Hale’s article about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This is my considered “secondary source.” On a number of instances, Hale directly quotes from Frankenstein, such as discussing how pages 17 and 18 depict an abnormal family unit. This was introduced in a section discussing Hale’s quoting of Frankenstein, and was related to the topic at hand of analyzing the article itself. Another way of phrasing this quotation is as follows: In Hale’s view, “Schoene-Harwood identifies Alphonse and Henry as “men who feel secure enough in their masculinity to display feelings of domestic affection…who seem perfectly balanced in their manliness which incorporates rather than categorically excludes the feminine” (Schoene-Harwood 16)” (Hale, pg. 13).

I have chosen to write about Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story in my final paper. Since Super Sad True Love Story was published relatively recently, in 2010, there isn’t an excess of literary commentary about it. However, some common topics that have been discussed about Shteyngart’s novel throughout scholarly journals include age, credit scores, identity, and dystopian societies. One article that I have found to be particularly interesting is titled “Ending Aging in the Shteyngart of Eden: Biogerontological discourse in a Super Sad True Love Story” written by Ulla Kriebernegg, and can be found at the following link: http://www.sciencedirect.com.proxy.library.emory.edu/science/article/pii/S0890406512000758. Kriebernegg discusses biogerontology, the subfield of gerontology that discusses why and how we age and how to slow the process, how the novel presents old age as a curable disease, and how the novel depicts age as both a uniting and dividing factor between Lenny and Eunice. In the introduction, Kriebernegg uses an argument from a New York Times article written by M. Kakutani, “every toxic development already at large in America to farcical extremes” to extend her own arguments about the dystopia in which Super Sad True Love Story takes place. This article presents an interesting argument that may help me develop an angle for my paper as well. Aging is not the primary concern of the novel’s plot, but age is always taken into consideration, and is very important at the end of the day. I would be interested in looking for another underlying aspect of the plot that isn’t obvious in every journal entry or email but is vital to the storyline nonetheless, and influential to the characters’ actions and motives.

Jessica Hale’s primary argument is that anxiety about family and individuality lead to more prominent social issues, in addition to concerns about globalization, imperialism, and slavery. Hale argues her position using psychoanalytic theories and direct quotes from Mary Shelley’s novel, Frankenstein. On page 12 of Hale’s article, “Constructing Connectedness: Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” under the subtitle “Domestic and Public Spheres,” Hale makes many direct references to the text, Frankenstein. In the first paragraph, Hale inserts direct quotes such as “like a protecting spirit to the girl, who committed herself to his care” (18) and “it was an almost unquestioned premise that…both natural and divine law endowed the father with patriarchal authority as ‘head’ of a household” (60), and cited them both as such. Hale continues to cite direct quotes from the book throughout the rest of her article. Particularly on page 12, Hale cites from pages 17 and 18, and discusses the abnormal family unit. On page 13, Hale writes, “Schoene-Harwood identifies Alphonse and Henry as “men who feel secure enough in their masculinity to display feelings of domestic affection…who seem perfectly balanced in their manliness which incorporates rather than categorically excludes the feminine” (Schoene-Harwood 16).” This is Hale’s secondary source, quoting another article about the text she has chosen to analyze. There are a few words that are unfamiliar to me in this article, such as dichotomy, precludes, chattel, homosocial, and capacious. Definitions can be found using dictionaries such as Cambridge Free Dictionary, Dictionary.com, and Oxford-English Dictionary. For example, one foreign word that I encountered in Hale’s article was capacious. I went on to oed.com (Oxford-English Dictionary) and found the definition: capacious: adj; Of such size as to take in or hold; able to contain; having the capacity of or to; able to hold much; roomy, spacious, wide.

In the article The Era of Automatic Facial Recognition And Surveillance Is Here, by Bruce Schneier, the idea is introduced that computers will soon be able to download our entire biography just with one glimpse of our face on a video feed or photograph. This technology is soon to be available from store security cameras to passing police officers to Facebook and other social media. “A computer is now as good as a person,” Schneier writes, “and while we humans are pretty much as good at this as we’re ever going to get, computers will continue to improve” (Schneier, pg. 2). This surveillance technology is very similar to Gary Shteyngart’s, Super Sad True Love Story, how credit scores are available just by walking past certain poles on the street (SSTLS pg. 37-39), anyone can be stalked on the internet to the point where their parents’ home address can be found (SSTLS pg. 54-55), and one’s life story is available at the click of a button at a bar in Staten Island (SSTLS pg. 90-92). The idea that surveillance using technology to publicize identity simultaneously eliminates privacy in everyday life is less “facial recognition for all” and more “for those who can either demand of pay for access to the required technologies – most importantly, the tagged photo database” (Schneier, pg. 3). This particularly draws attention to pages 37 to 39 of Super Sad True Love Story, where Lenny uses the internet to find out everything about Eunice Park that there is to know, from her original home in southern California to the size of clothing that Eunice and her sister Sally prefer to wear and the photographs posted on social media sites. Lenny has access to every detail of Eunice’s life on his personal computer and he’s only just met her at this point in the novel. The society depicted in Super Sad True Love Story is exactly the kind of society that is plagued by surveillance that eliminates all privacy with just a flash of one’s face across a security camera feed.

Schneier, Bruce. “The Era Of Automatic Facial Recognition And Surveillance Is Here.” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 29 Sept. 2015. Web. 5 Oct. 2015. <http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceschneier/2015/09/29/the-era-of-automatic-facial-recognition-and-surveillance-is-here/>.

One scene in Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story that I have found particularly dystopic is sadly a very realistic occurrence. On pages 246 to 248, Lenny is fleeing Staten Island with Eunice, Noah, and Amy, after receiving orders from Joshie to return to Manhattan as soon as possible. There are two ferries departing Staten Island, and Noah and Amy board a different ferry than Lenny and Eunice. While Lenny is communicating to his “American Mama” Nettie Fine that he is on a ferry to Manhattan and his friend Noah is on a different ferry but they are both safe, she asks Lenny which ferry he is on. This should alert him to an incoming problem, but he doesn’t see the red flag. Almost immediately after Lenny tells Nettie Fine which ferry he is on, the opposing ferry is blown up in the water.

The image I have chosen to represent this scene is a photograph taken of New York City on September 11^th, 2001. The twin towers, located in lower Manhattan, were hit by airplanes as part of a terrorist attack on the city. Many were killed, even more were injured, and the city was shut down for weeks. This event hits particularly close to home for me, literally and physically, as I was living in New York City when this occurred. Nobody could believe what they were watching on the news, that something like this could actually happen. For months after 9/11, New Yorkers were scared to leave their homes, worried that the city was going to be targeted and hit again. As I was reading this scene of Super Sad True Love Story, I knew one of the ferries was going to be blown up. I got a gut wrenching feeling and immediately thought back to 9/11. I don’t remember this specifically, but my mother has told me that I knew something bad was happening in New York, even though she hadn’t told me. I was only 4 years old; I wasn’t supposed to know that. On this one day in New York’s history, the beloved city appeared to be a dystopic nightmare.