Integrating ideas: Be able to integrate their ideas with others using summary, paraphrase, quotation, analysis, and synthesis of relevant sources.

I’ve found that source integration doesn’t only help with backing up my claims, but it can also strengthen my personal experiences. Learning to merge my experience with the experiences of others helped give my writing more strength. At the start of the course I relied solely on what I was taught in high school. In my first and second essays I rarely used partial quotes or paraphrasing, and I used the same signal phrase for each quote. I didn’t know any different, so the tools I was given in the course helped tremendously. By the last essay my use of source integration flowed way better and I was able use quotes more efficiently.

Image 1: This is an example of a quote from my second essay. Here I used the usual signal phrase so and so said. Even in this essay I still struggled with mixing up my signal phrases. This quote is also very long, I could have used a partial quote or paraphrase to help the paragraph flow better.

Image 2: This is an example from Essay 3. This is just one example of a paraphrase which I used more extensively compared to the other two essays. I found that using these other tools allowed my writing to flow better when reading it. They also helped me better explain my ideas and get my point through.