Why We Study African-American History--to Combat Barbarism
There are politicians banning the teaching of African-American history under the false claim that this content goes under the banner of “Critical Race Theory.” They achieve their fraud by simply calling anything they don’t like CRT.
They falsely claim that teachers who present AA history to their students are “indoctrinating” their students.
This lie is underscored by a governor who recently said that slavery was a teaching tool for black people and that it gave them “job skills.” Such an asinine statement reveals this man to be a charlatan and a purveyor of one of the oldest racist remarks from America’s racist toolbox, The Lost Cause, which falsely elevates slavery and says it was a benefit to society.
Slavery and Jim Crow are barbaric expressions of failed human beings.
Failed human beings glory in the barbaric.
During Jim Crow lynchings, for example, white people attended mutilations and executions in a picnic-style celebration: These white spectators took teeth, and bones of the victims as "prizes." They also took pieces of whips, ropes, chains, and other weapons used in these killings as "souvenirs" to bookmark their cherished memories. Major League baseball player and manager John McGraw (played and managed between 1891 and 1932) kept a piece of rope used in a lynching in his pocket for decades. Why? Because he saw this rope as a "good-luck charm."
These are not the acts of morally-developed, self-actualized human beings.
These are not the acts of people who should define America.
These are not the acts of people whose statues should festoon government buildings.
These are the acts of barbarians. Don't let anyone sell you on the Lost Cause.
Real History
Let real history tell you what Jim Crow was like. It was like this: In the millions, blacks in the south got the hell out of the south and went north. You can read about it in The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson. If you read that book, you will have no illusions about the Lost Cause.
To erase real history and replace that real history with The Lost Cause is barbaric.
This kind of barbarism should be repelled because such barbarism creates an ugly America.
His egregious remark is a reminder of why we need AA history:
We need to see the line between the tropes and false doctrines of the racist toolbox created during Jim Crow (1877-1964) and the same racist toolbox used today by white supremacist Internet trolls and their minions who weaponize misinformation.
The Racist Toolbox:
The Lost Cause:
The myth that slavery was a beautiful institution enjoyed by whites and blacks alike and was tragically taken away by “Northern aggression.” In this grotesque mythology, evil northerners stripped the southern states of their “state rights.”
Replacement Theory:
This racist idea says that “whites were first in America” and that “this land is their blood and soil” and that they must not be replaced by “people who don’t look like them.” This includes people of color and the Jews. White nationalists gathered in Charlottesville in 2017 chanting, “They will not replace us.”
Scapegoating:
Rather than find complex solutions to complex problems, people have too often used scapegoating: demonizing the out group and making them to blame for all their problems: crime, unemployment, overpopulation, mismanaged cities, etc.
White grievance:
Whenever the world becomes confusing and scary, there is a history of American white people grieving over the “golden age” and the “good old days” when white people dominated and “other people knew their place.”
White grievance can be used by cynical politicians to manipulate large groups of people.
White grievance is part of America’s cultural war. While songwriter Oliver Anthony denies appealing to white grievance, his song “Rich Men of Richmond” has been appropriated by many whites as their “white anthem” of white grievance.
What is the purpose of learning African-American history?
We study African-American history for 3 reasons:
Identifying the racist toolbox from Jim Crow allows us to see the same toolbox today so that we can identify patterns of behavior that are anti-democratic and anti-American.
We acknowledge powerful African-American voices to learn moral lessons to strengthen American democracy against a spirit of barbaric racial supremacy. Failure to acknowledge these voices is to erase history and erasing history is an attempt to erase an entire people.
We study important African-American voices who believed in American democracy and the Great Experiment provided we struggled for inclusion and equality for voting rights, legal representation, job opportunities, and the individual right to happiness.
The alternative is a country of barbaric racial nationalism where an entitled race oppresses all others.
Great Voices Didn't Hate America or Succumb to Nihilism
Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King were not nihilists who hated America. They believed the Great Experiment could only work if we fought for inclusion and equality. If we didn’t take inclusion and equality seriously, we were making a mockery of the very idea of America.
Jim Crow and white supremacy therefore are a mockery and a denigration of America, that is unless you want that kind of America.
We study African-American voices to understand what kind of Americas there are and which one we want.
What we don’t aim to do in studying African-American history:
We don’t indoctrinate people with theories, we don’t argue to “defund the police,” we don’t smear people’s noses in the evils of slavery and Jim Crow without a purpose.
Our purpose is to show that there are 2 Americas and fight for the one that stands for inclusion.
The stakes are high.
One Body Paragraph: Teach AA History as a Remedy to Misinformation
Blacks First Victims of Weaponized Misinformation
Do not think weaponized misinformation is something new.
As we can see in Professor David Pilgrim’s outstanding video “The Jim Crow Museum,” creating a Jim Crow world that exploited black people was the result of weaponized misinformation about the identity of black people, their role, their purpose, their place in white society.
This weaponized misinformation was developed through an obsessive propaganda campaign that was designed to seep into the very tissue of Southern life whether it be politics, policy, vagrancy laws, segregation, domestic life, and the very smallest of actions of everyday life.
We don't want to be apologists for a grotesque version of America by white-washing the past and framing it with the perfume of the Lost Cause. To do so, is to weaponize misinformation.
This weaponized misinformation was reinforced by abusive rules that put a dividing line between white and black America in the service of making whites feel superior and to enjoy power over black Americans. To review some of these oppressive Jim Crow rules:
- Black children had to learn in separate schoolhouses, always rundown with no resources.
- Black people had to sit in filthy waiting rooms at doctors’ offices while whites enjoyed clean waiting rooms.
- When black people walked opposite direction a white person on the sidewalk, the black people had to step off the sidewalk and walk on the curb.
- Black people had to give all the good parking spaces to white people. Whites parked close to stores. Blacks parked far away.
- No matter how slowly a white driver was going in a car, a black driver was never allowed to pass the white person’s car.
- When a white person was at fault for a car accident involving a black driver, the fault always was assigned to the black driver. “You’re black so it’s your fault.”
- Blacks and whites couldn’t play chess or checkers together because such a game suggested they were equal.
- Black people were not allowed to argue with white people. Disagreement was not allowed because if a black person challenged a white person, this mental agility violated the weaponized misinformation that said whites were the superior race.
- White people had a paternal relationship with black people so that whites were the parents and blacks were the children, but this was not a loving relationship between parent and child; this was an abusive relationship, and black Americans wanted out evidenced by the fact of The Great Migration between 1915 and 1970 when black Americans fled to the west and north cities to find a better life. By the time the Great Migration was over, half of black Americans in the south were gone.
Weaponized Misinformation Is a Form of Gaslighting
Demonizing the victims is an old playbook in the United States, fueled by white nationalists who after the Civil War created the grotesque lie and myth, called The Lost Cause, that slavery was a good thing, that black Americans were happy in slavery, and that the South fought the evil North for “state rights.”
The myth of The Lost Cause, which was weaponized by The United Daughters of the Confederacy by making public school textbooks about it, was a doctrine drilled into the minds of school children.
YouTube video: “How Southern Socialites Rewrote American History”
America has a history of white racists feeding upon weaponized misinformation to promote their agenda.
Racists today enjoy social media to weaponize misinformation.
There is a line that connects the Lost Cause and Conspiracy Theories
Lost Cause and Sandy Hook
In fact, we can draw a line between this gaslighting of white nationalists in the form of The Lost Cause to all sorts of misinformation campaigns, including the demonizing of the innocent parents of Sandy Hook who lost their children in a school massacre that took place on December 14, 2012. The author of Sandy Hook: An American Tragedy and the Battle for Truth, Elizabeth Williamson, rightly connects this Great Sandy Hook Lie to the Great Election Lie that took place during the US Capitol insurrection of Jan 6, 2021. Once again, people with ties to white nationalism were on board with this misinformation, including perhaps most notably conspiracy-peddler and “profiteer” Alex Jones.
Epigraph:
Her book is not a focus on guns but a focus on truth vs. misinformation. Indeed, her book begins with the Robert Musil epigraph: “No culture can rest on a crooked relationship to truth.” This applies to the realities of slavery and Jim Crow in the face of the lies from The Lost Cause and it applies to the realities of the tragedy of Sandy Hook in the face of the mythology created by Alex Jones that Sandy Hook was a staged event designed to create gun legislation.
Alex Jones, described correctly as a salesman a narcissist, and “a conjurer of dark American impulses,” and others took every small detail of the reportage that had been wrong and used these errors as an excuse to push a myth about the shooting being a hoax, a staged event designed by the government to take away gun rights.
Marketing Sandy Hook as a “false flag operation” to line his pockets at the expense of Sandy Hook’s grieving parents, Alex Jones milked his conspiracy theory for every ounce as he knew he had a receptive Alt-Right, mostly male audience who are hungry for Alex Jones morally-bankrupt content, including Replacement Theory and the idea that whites are being taken over by others. In Williamson’s credible profile of Alex Jones, he comes across convincingly as a professional pathological liar. Ten years ago, Jones would have been merely a pathetic curiosity, but now with many in the GOP embracing Jones and the most popular podcaster Joe Rogan giving Jones a platform, Jones represents a major force in our post-truth world.
Williamson observes that Sandy Hook represents a turning point: All subsequent tragedies have had a viral conspiracy theory claiming that these shooting tragedies were orchestrated by the government as a pretext for confiscating guns and revoking the Second Amendment. The author points out that by 2020 one out of five Americans believed that every school shooting was a fake.
Williamson doesn’t claim to know if Jones is sincere in his bizarre claims or not, only to observe that he enjoys making huge profits over his conspiracies regardless of who gets hurt, even the parents who lost their children in a massacre.
Americans are living in a fever swamp of misinformation, mostly peddled by the Alt-Right. The Lost Cause, Sandy Hook, Pizzagate, The Great Lie, and many Covid conspiracies come out of this fever swamp, and no vital democracy can exist in such a place.
The Civil War was complicated in its origins, but one of its outcomes was supposed to be freedom and justice for all Americans, an objective that was curtailed by Jim Crow and the weaponized misinformation that supported Jim Crow.
Weaponized misinformation is a tool that spreads racism and autocracy.
In Childish Gambino’s viral YouTube video, “This Is America,” the singer refers to the cell phone, a “celly,” as a “tool,” and in the social media age of distractions and weaponized misinformation, we see Childish Gambino connecting the tissue of weaponized misinformation to Jim Crow 2.0 in the social media age to the Jim Crow 1.0 in the Post-Civil War Age, so well explained in Dr. Pilgrim’s “Jim Crow Museum” video.
How is the “celly as a tool” expounded upon in Childish Gambino’s video?
First of all, a choir of black singers are gunned down in what is a reference to white supremacist Dylann Roof committing a massacre at the AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.
Thanks to conspiracy theorists who champion the agenda of the Alt-Right White Nationalists such as Alex Jones, one out of five Americans believed this massacre and other massacres, most notably school shootings, designed to be hoaxes to cause sympathy for victims of gun violence and to compel the government to confiscate guns.
The thematic richness of “This Is America” was such that Childish Gambino won Best Music Video of the Year for the 2019 Grammys, but he was not in attendance. Perhaps we can infer that the tragedy Donald Glover rendered in that video did not merit fanfare or glory, so he accepted the award in silence and refuses to talk about his video.
Alex Jones and like-minded white supremacists have a history of gaslighting and weaponizing misinformation. In Jim Crow 1.0, the white supremacists turned the world upside down, blaming the innocent victims for their subjugation and abuse by creating a world saturated by Jim Crow hate propaganda, as evidenced in Dr. Pilgrim’s “Jim Crow Museum” video.
Jim Crow Today: 2.0
- Aggrieved outcasts who believe in conspiracies and are attracted to white supremacist movements such as Dylann Roof
- An entire society with no sense of real history. Distracted by their cell phones, they get weaponized misinformation mixed up with all the other information
- A distracted society succumbs to authoritarian and racist leadership like a frog boiling slowly in water as it barely feels it
- Society is mired in conspiracy theories
Dylann Roof and Alex Jones in Jim Crow 2.0
Similarly, white supremacists today, such as Dylann Roof, are cold-blood killers, massacring innocent black Americans inside a church and then they have the gall and moral bankruptcy, such as Alex Jones, to deny such massacres exist at all, that in fact these massacres were a hoax designed to give the government power to confiscate guns. As ridiculous as such a claim sounds, Alex Jones has made millions of dollars propagating such conspiracies.
Just as Alex Jones and his ilk get rich spreading racist propaganda, white racists during Jim Crow made money off the blood, sweat, and tears of black Americans by creating their own racist propaganda.
Therefore, we can conclude that weaponized misinformation, usually rooted in racist propaganda, is the connective tissue between Jim Crow 1.0 and Jim Crow 2.0.
***
Suggested Outline
Paragraph 1: Draw from Dr. David Pilgrim's video "The New Jim Crow Museum" and Childish Gambino's video "This Is America" to write an extended definition of Jim Crow.
Paragraph 2: Summarize Henry Louis Gates' essay.
Paragraph 3: Write your thesis in which you defend, refute, or complicate the argument that teaching about the history of systemic racism, slavery, and Jim Crow is not a radical agenda set forth by some professors to brainwash their students into a Woke ideology. Rather, such teaching is a powerful antidote to historical revisionism and weaponized misinformation designed to oppress the already oppressed, is a powerful part of developing empathy which makes for a better society, prevents us from repeating the mistakes and injustices of the past, addresses the historical connection between American racism and gun violence, and strengthens democracy for all people.
Paragraphs 4-7 are your supporting paragraphs.
Paragraph 8 is your counterargument-rebuttal.
Paragraph 9 is your conclusion, a powerful restatement of your claim.
Why Do We Study African-American History?
- To understand the racist toolbox that today’s Internet trolls are using to weaponize their misinformation for the sake of power.
- To understand that historical revisionism, The Lost Cause, Replacement Theory, and Scapegoating have been in the racist toolbox since the days of Jim Crow.
- To understand that historical revisionism is a power play, thus the adage: “The winners get to write history.”
- To understand that there are historical narratives by Alex Haley, Dr. David Pilgrim, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Toni Morrison, and Frederick Douglass that speak to personal excellence, courage, sacrifice, and contributions to America that are often overlooked or obfuscated by people with sinister agendas.
- To understand that failure to understand history results in large portions of America worshipping racist iconography in the form of Confederate flags and pro-slave statues, an abomination not performed in other countries.
Thesis Samples
The Florida governor is wrong to ban the teaching of African-American history under the justification of calling all such history “Critical Race Theory.”
The Florida governor is wrong to ban the teaching of African-American history under the justification of calling all such history “Critical Race Theory” because ________________, ______________, _______________, and ___________________.
To ban African-American history under the fake excuse that all such history is “Critical Race Theory” is a craven act fueled by a demagogue’s willingness to slake racist appetites, a demagogue's willingness to reach into the racist toolbox of Jim Crow tropes and false narratives, and his willingness to erasing voices, which in turn is a way of erasing an entire people.
While some displays of Critical Race Theory have proven too extreme in the classroom such as slavery reenactments, which can traumatize small children, such extremes do not negate the urgency to teach African-American history. This urgency is evident in the need to fight back against false tropes and narratives that have found a resurgence in America, to give Americans African-American voices that provide a counter-narrative to that of the racist trolls who swarm social media, and to present Americans with the challenges we face regarding justice today regarding racial violence, xenophobia, and voter suppression.
Not knowing African-American history has consequences:
***
What Is Jim Crow 1.0?
Jim Crow was born of white southern resentment to losing the Civil War, losing slavery, and being told by the northerners that their way of life was evil.
Full of resentment, white southerners scapegoated black people by crushing them with a series of cruel and often ridiculous laws that were enforced by violence. These oppressive laws in the words of Isabel Wilkerson constituted a “feudal caste system” with the privileged and servant classes.
Jim Crow was a sneaky way white southerners brought back slavery “off the books” by making black people subject to violence and exploitation with no protection from the law. In other words, slavery was illegal but Jim Crow brought it back under another name.
In other words, the Civil War did not end slavery; it merely shifted slavery into another form called Jim Crow. This shift is chronicled in Douglas A. Blackman’s book Slavery By Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II.
Perhaps the best book ever written about Jim Crow from the point of view of African Americans is Isabel Wilkerson’s award-winning The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration in which six million African Americans fled the south to escape Jim Crow.
Wilkerson interviewed over 1,000 black Americans who lived in the terror of Jim Crow and fled for their lives to the Northern and Western states between 1915 and 1970.
Over six decades, six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow south not knowing what was in store for them. By the end of the Great Migration, almost half of all the black Americans in the south were gone. They had no job, no place to live, no assurance of the means to survive, but they went anyway.
That should tell us just how bad Jim Crow was. “I don’t know what’s in store for me, but I’m getting the hell out.” Jim Crow was a 24/7 Torture Chamber.
All they knew was one thing: Whatever they faced, it couldn’t be worse than living in the Jim Crow states.
Characteristics of Jim Crow
One. Jim Crow didn’t allow black people to flourish.
In 1953, a black doctor Robert Joseph Pershing Foster got out of Monroe, Louisiana, and headed for California. Why? Because even though he was qualified in the highest medical procedures, the whites wouldn’t let him practice surgery.
In the Jim Crow south, whites didn’t like to grant any rights to blacks that suggested that blacks were equal to them. Allowing a black man to practice surgery was just too much for the whites to bear. The mere suggestion that blacks were talented and intelligent was a scandal to white southerners and a threat to their carefully curated racist paradigm, so Dr. Foster got in his car and headed for California.
Two. Jim Crow was a living hell.
Jim Crow was so hellish that it created The Great Migration, the greatest migration ever recorded in America, a migration that far exceeded the California Gold Rush of the 1850s, and yet the Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson points out, is underreported. Not much is known about a migration that completely changed America, sending black people to urban cities in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and other major cities.
Three. Jim Crow was a danger to black lives.
Isabel Wilkerson makes an astute observation: A lot of black people that we know about would not have existed except that their parents got out of the deadly Jim Crow south. She points out that James Baldwin, Michelle Obama, Miles Davis, Toni Morrison, Spike Lee, and Denzel Washington were “all products of the Great Migration” and might not exist but for the fact that their parents fled for their lives.
Four. Jim Crow celebrated the myth of The Lost Cause.
The Lost Cause is a re-imagining of slavery as “a good thing” in which slave owners and slaves were happy in a bucolic paradise where whites and blacks “knew their place” and were blessed by God. Such heinous chicanery was embraced by the United Daughters of the Confederacy who published propaganda books to brainwash children in the Jim Crow public schools.
The myth of the Lost Cause is so strong that to this day the great military heroes of the North who brought an end to slavery--Ulysses Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, George Henry Thomas, David Farragut are to this day hated and reviled in the south.
Five. Jim Crow is a stain on American History that America has tried to sweep under the carpet.
Wilkerson understood that you couldn’t really understand the hell of Jim Crow unless you saw how black people reacted to it: Fleeing for their lives in a mass migration. She was astonished that before her book virtually nothing was written about the mass escape from Jim Crow. It’s as if historians are too ashamed of this chapter or not interested in it. Wilkinson has remedied that by writing a 550-page masterpiece about the subject.
Six. Jim Crow’s tentacles reached into the smallest areas of black lives to create daily humiliations. Here are some:
- Black children had to learn in separate schoolhouses, always rundown with no resources.
- Black people had to sit in filthy waiting rooms at doctors’ offices while whites enjoyed clean waiting rooms.
- When black people walked opposite direction a white person on the sidewalk, the black people had to step off the sidewalk and walk on the curb.
- Black people had to give all the good parking spaces to white people. Whites parked close to stores. Blacks parked far away.
- No matter how slowly a white driver was going in a car, a black driver was never allowed to pass the white person’s car.
- When a white person was at fault for a car accident involving a black driver, the fault always was assigned to the black driver. “You’re black so it’s your fault.”
- Blacks and whites couldn’t play chess or checkers together because such a game suggested they were equal.
- In one of Chris Rock's stand-up routines, he talks about his mother born in South Carolina in 1945. When she had a toothache as a child, she wasn't allowed to go the dentist as a black person. She had to go to the local veterinarian. That is Jim Crow.
Seven. Jim Crow violated the Constitution.
As Wilkerson writes: “The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870, which guaranteed all men the right to vote” (38).
The North tried to grant rights to blacks in the south, but by the mid-1870s, Wilkerson observes, the North bailed on the south and stopped their oversight.
Eight. Hostility towards blacks in the South was so acute that white politicians who fomented racism against blacks enjoyed popularity, which they leveraged for self-gain.
When political leaders spoke of black people deserving violence, the white masses saw this as “open season” to commit any violence they wanted against blacks with impunity.
Nine. Lynchings of black people became an epidemic that was normalized and glorified by white southerners.
In one of the most painful chapters to read in Wilkerson’s book, we read that a black man who was merely accused of looking at a white woman would be lynched. Petty crimes were always worthy of a lynching.
These lynchings, which included beatings, hangings, and being burned alive, were watched by “festive crowds” who brought their children and let their toddlers sit on their shoulders to enjoy the spectacle.
I’m reading this, and I’m thinking I’d be part of the Great Migration myself. I would be urgent to leave the south.
How frequent were these lynchings?
Wilkerson writes: “Across the South, someone was hanged or burned alive every four days from 1889 to 1929, according to the 1933 book The Tragedy of Lynching.”
According to Dr. David Pilgrim, there were 4,730 lynchings that we know about but no doubt many more.
Avoiding Comma Splices and Run-Ons
Fused (run-on) sentence
Klee's paintings seem simple, they are very sophisticated.
She doubted the value of medication she decided to try it once.
A fused sentence (also called a run-on) joins clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence with no punctuation or words to link them. Fused sentences must be either divided into separate sentences or joined by adding words or punctuation.
Comma Splice
I was strongly attracted to her, she was beautiful and funny.
We hated the meat loaf, the cafeteria served it every Friday.
A comma splice occurs when only a comma separates clauses that could each stand alone as a sentence. To correct a comma splice, you can insert a semicolon or period, connect the clauses with a word such as and or because, or restructure the sentence.
After each sentence, put a “C” for Correct or a “CS” for Comma Splice. If the sentence is a comma splice, rewrite it so that it is correct.
One. Bailey used to eat ten pizzas a day, now he eats a spinach salad for lunch and dinner.
Two. Marco no longer runs on the treadmill, instead he opts for the less injury-causing elliptical trainer.
Three. Running can cause shin splints, which can cause excruciating pain.
Four. Running in the incorrect form can wreak havoc on the knees, slowing down can often correct the problem.
Five. While we live in a society where 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers are on the rise, the reading of books, sad to say, is on the decline.
Six. Facebook is a haven for narcissists, it encourages showing off with selfies and other mundane activities that are ways of showing how great and amazing our lives our, what a sham.
Seven. We live in a society where more and more Americans are consuming 1,500-calorie cheeseburgers, however, those same Americans are reading less and less books.
Eight. Love is a virus from outer space, it tends to become most contagious during April and May.
Nine. The tarantula causes horror in many people, moreover there is a species of tarantula in Brazil, the wandering banana spider, that is the most venomous spider in the world.
Ten. Even though spiders cause many people to recoil with horror, most species are harmless.
Eleven. The high repair costs of European luxury vehicles repelled Amanda from buying such a car, instead she opted for a Japanese-made Lexus.
Twelve. Amanda got a job at the Lexus dealership, now she’s trying to get me a job in the same office.
Thirteen. While consuming several cinnamon buns, a twelve-egg cheese omelet, ten slices of French toast slathered in maple syrup, and a tray of Swedish loganberry crepes topped with a dollop of blueberry jam, I contemplated the very grave possibility that I might be eating my way to a heart attack.
Fourteen. Even though I rank marijuana far less dangerous than most pharmaceutical drugs, alcohol, and other commonly used intoxicants, I find marijuana unappealing for a host of reasons, not the least of which is its potential for radically degrading brain cells, its enormous effect on stimulating the appetite, resulting in obesity, and its capacity for over-relaxing many people so that they lose significant motivation to achieve their primary goals, opting instead for a life of sloth and intractable indolence.
Importance of Signal Phrases in Your Introductory Paragraph
It is important that you show your ability to summarize, paraphrase, and quote Dr. Pilgrim’s points by using signal phrases, which are short phrases you use to introduce quoted, paraphrased, or summarized content. Here are 6 important components to consider when writing signal phrases:
Review Complete 6 Components of Signal Phrases
- Vary your transitions so you're not only using "say" and "write."
- Transition from your own writing to quoted or paraphrased material.
- Vary your location of the signal phrase, beginning, middle, or end.
- Provide credentials of the person being cited in your signal phrase.
- Provide correct in-text citations for MLA format, as provided by Purdue Owl.
- Return to what you just cited and analyze its significance to your argument.
For a fuller explanation of signal phrases, I would refer to my Breakthrough Writer blog post, “Mastering the 6 Components of Signal Phrases.”
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