Critical Thinker: October 2012

Integrating Quotations and Paraphrases in Your Essay

Signal Phrases for Quotations

USE THESE SIGNAL PHRASE TEMPLATES:

Model Signal Phrases:

In the words of researchers Redelmeier and Tibshirani, “…”

As Matt Sundeen has noted, “…”

Patti Pena, mother of a child killed by a driver distracted by a cell phone, points out that “…”

“…” writes Christine Haughney, “…”

“…” claims wireless spokesperson Annette Jacobs.

Radio hosts Tom and Ray Magliozzi offer a persuasive counterargument: “…”

From Loyola University, a look at signal phrases:

To avoid monotony, vary the signal phrases you use to integrate quotations, as in these examples:

In the words of author and essayist Samuel Johnson, “The true measure of a man is how he treats someone who can do him absolutely no good."

As Divakaruni has noted, “Looking down from the heights of Maslow's pyramid, it seems inconceivable to us that someone could actually prefer bread to freedom.”

Arthur Hardy, a renowned expert on New Orleans Carnival traditions, points out that “Mardi Gras came to North America from Paris, where it had been celebrated since the Middle Ages.”

Racial profiling “makes a mockery of the rights to which people in this country are entitled,” claims columnist Colbert I. King.

Sir Winston Churchill offers this wise advice: "If you are going through hell, keep going."

Sheffield answers her critics by conceding, “The proposal did not account sufficiently for the economic downturn.”

Signal phrases and attributors may come anywhere within your sentence—at the beginning, to introduce a quotation; in the middle of a quotation; or at the end, after the quotation has been given.

For example:

“We have a crime problem in this country,” writes Barry Goldwater, “not a gun problem.”

“We have a crime problem in this country, not a gun problem,” asserts the late Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.

You don’t always have to use a writer’s name in your signal phrase, for example:

One U.S. Senator has claimed, “We have a crime problem in this country, not a gun problem.”

Many opponents of gun-control regulations would agree that “[w]e have a crime problem in this country, not a gun problem.”

Vary the signal verbs you use to introduce quotations, and choose them with care.

Use the verb that most closely captures how your source is presenting the idea. Is the author you are quoting merely saying something? Or would it be more accurate to write that the source is arguing a point, making an observation, reporting facts, drawing a conclusion, refuting an argument, or stating a belief? Choose the verb that makes the author’s stance clear. There are many available to use, including these:

acknowledges	comments	describes	maintains	reports
adds	compares	disputes	notes	responds
admits	concedes	emphasizes	observes	shows
agrees	confirms	endorses	points out	states
argues	contends	illustrates	reasons	suggests
asserts	declares	implies	refutes	summarizes
claims	denies	insists	rejects	writes

A reminder about grammar: A quotation must be made to fit the syntax and grammar of your sentence, so take care as you experiment with signal phrases to introduce quotations. Make sure the result is a grammatically correct sentence. Do not use signal phrase such as “he writes” to introduce a quotation that is not a complete sentence, such as in the following example:

Incorrect: Brown writes, “My childhood, which was happy and carefree, but passed by too fast.”

Correct: Brown writes, “My childhood . . . was happy and carefree, but passed by too fast.”

Also correct: Brown describes her childhood as “happy and carefree,” but she laments that it “passed by too fast.”

As in the examples above, you may need to use ellipses marks and brackets to modify a quotation for the sake of sentence grammar, but never distort the original meaning of the quotation as you do so.

A reminder about punctuation: Quotations may be introduced by two--and only two--marks of punctuation, the comma and the colon. Never introduce a quotation with a semicolon.

A reminder about source citation: None of the examples above use citations to attribute the quotation to its source. Be aware that whenever you use a quotation in your paper, you should cite it using the citation style specified by your professor, such as MLA style for papers in the humanities, APA style for papers in psychology, Chicago or Turabian style for papers in history.

Let's find the signal phrases in this essay that warns of the energy lapses from drinking coffee.

Essay Option 3

Analyze the corruption of fatherly love in "Cleanness" or "Caterpillars" (or both) with Erich Fromm's notion of the Authoritarian Personality. Be sure your essay is 1,200 words and includes a Works Cited page with a minimum of 2 sources.

Match the Assignment with the Correct Thesis Type

Thesis and the 4 Types of Claims on Purdue Owl

Thesis Samples

Cause and Effect Thesis:

The characters in Lasdun's fiction are saddled by perpetual adolescence, which is the result of _______________, ______________, ________________, and __________________.

Argumentative Thesis

Abel has made the right decision to end his marriage because of the superior freedom afforded by the bachelor Stewart evidenced by ______, ________, __________, and _________.

Definition Thesis

What appears to be insurmountable obstacles in the characters' lives are really problems that can be solved if the characters free themselves from their learned helplessness, which is evidenced by __________, ___________, ____________, and ____________.

Claims of Worth Thesis

The most valuable lesson we learn from James Lasdun's stories is that metacognition is the number one facility that allows us to undergo a radical transformation, free ourselves of our mindless habits, and conquer the mental disease of narcissism.

Which thesis applies to today's assignment?

Essay Option 3

Erich Fromm's linked passage:

What do we mean by “authoritarian personality”? We usually see a clear difference between the individual who wants to rule, control, or restrain others and the individual who tends to submit, obey, or to be humiliated. To use a somewhat friendlier term, we might talk of the leader and his followers. As natural as the difference between the ruling and the ruled might — in many ways — be, we also have to admit that these two types, or as we can also say, these two forms of authoritarian personality are actually tightly bound together.

What they have in common, what defines the essence of the authoritarian personality is an inability: the inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent, to put it in other words: to endure freedom.

The opposite of the authoritarian character is the mature person: a person who does not need to cling to others because he actively embraces and grasps the world, the people, and the things around him. What does that mean? Children still need to cling. In their mother’s womb they are — in a physical sense — one with their mother. After birth, for several months and in many ways even for years, they remain — in a psychological sense — still a part of their mother. Children could not exist without the mother’s help. However, they grow and develop. They learn to walk, to talk, and find their way around the world which becomes their world. Children possess two skills, inherent to the individual, which they can develop: love and reason.

Love is the bond and the feeling of being one with the world while keeping one’s own independence and integrity. The loving individual is connected with the world. He is not frightened since the world is his home. He can lose himself because he is certain of himself.

Love means recognizing the world as an emotional experience. However, there is also another way of recognizing, understanding with the mind. We call this kind of understanding reason. It is different from Intelligence. Intelligence is using the mind to reach certain practical goals. A chimpanzee demonstrates intelligence when he sees a banana in front of his cage but cannot reach it with either one of the two sticks in his cage, then he joins both sticks and gets the banana. This is the intelligence of the animal, which is the same manipulating intelligence that we usually call understanding when talking of people. Reason is something else. Reason is the activity of the mind which attempts to get through the surface to reach the core of things, to grasp what really lies behind these things, what the forces and drives are that — themselves invisible — operate and determine the manifestations.

I have given this description of the mature, i.e. the loving and reasoning individual to better define the essence of the authoritarian personality. The authoritarian character has not reached maturity; he can neither love nor make use of reason. As a result, he is extremely alone which means that he is gripped by a deeply rooted fear. He needs to feel a bond, which requires neither love nor reason — and he finds it in the symbiotic relationship, in feeling-one with others; not by reserving his own identity, but rather by fusing, by destroying his own identity. The authoritarian character needs another person to fuse with because he cannot endure his own aloneness and fear.

But here we reach the boundaries of what both forms of the authoritarian character — the ruling and the ruled — have in common.

[STOP READING HERE]

The passive-authoritarian, or in other words, the masochistic and submissive character aims — at least subconsciously — to become a part of a larger unit, a pendant, a particle, at least a small one, of this “great” person, this “great” institution, or this “great” idea. The person, institution, or idea may actually be significant, powerful, or just incredibly inflated by the individual believing in them. What is necessary, is that — in a subjective manner — the individual is convinced that “his” leader, party, state, or idea is all-powerful and supreme, that he himself is strong and great, that he is a part of something “greater.” The paradox of this passive form of the authoritarian character is: the individual belittles himself so that he can — as part of something greater — become great himself. The individual wants to receive commands, so that he does not have the necessity to make decisions and carry responsibility. This masochistic individual looking for dependency is in his depth frightened -often only subconsciously — a feeling of inferiority, powerlessness, aloneness. Because of this, he is looking for the “leader,” the great power, to feel safe and protected through participation and to overcome his own inferiority. Subconsciously, he feels his own powerlessness and needs the leader to control this feeling. This masochistic and submissive individual, who fears freedom and escapes into idolatry, is the person on which the authoritarian systems — Nazism and Stalinism — rest.

More difficult than understanding the passive-authoritarian, masochistic character is understanding the active-authoritarian, the sadistic character. To his followers he seems self-confident and powerful but yet he is as frightened and alone as the masochistic character. While the masochist feels strong because he is a small part of something greater, the sadist feels strong because he has incorporated others — if possible many others; he has devoured them, so to speak. The sadistic-authoritarian character is as dependent on the ruled as the masochistic -authoritarian character on the ruler. However the image is misleading. As long as he holds power, the leader appears — to himself and to others — strong and powerful. His powerlessness becomes only apparent when he has lost his power, when he can no longer devour others, when he is on his own.

When I speak of sadism as the active side of the authoritarian personality, many people may be surprised because sadism is usually understood as the tendency to torment and to cause pain. But actually, this is not the point of sadism. The different forms of sadism which we can observe have their root in a striving, which is to master and control another individual, to make him a helpless object of one’s will, to become his ruler, to dispose over him as one sees fit and without limitations. Humiliation and enslavement are just means to this purpose, and the most radical means to this is to make him suffer; as there is no greater power over a person than to make him suffer, to force him to endure pains without resistance.

The fact that both forms of the authoritarian personality can be traced back to one final common point — the symbiotic tendency — demonstrates why one can find both the sadistic and masochistic component in so many authoritarian personalities. Usually, only the objects differ. We all have heard of the family tyrant, who treats his wife and children in an sadistic manner but when he faces his superior in the office he becomes the submissive employee. Or to name a better known example: Hitler. He was driven by the desire to rule all, the German nation and finally the world, to make them powerless objects of his will. And still, this same man was extremely dependent; dependent on the masses’ applause, on his advisers’ approval, and on what he called the higher power of nature, history, and fate. He employed pseudo-religious formulations to express these ideas when for example he said: “the heaven stands above the nation, as one can fortunately mislead man, but not heaven.” However, the power that impressed Hitler more than history, god, or fate was nature. Contrary to the tendency of the last four hundred years to dominate nature, Hitler insisted that one can and should dominate man but never nature. In him, we find this characteristic mixture of sadistic and masochistic tendencies of an authoritarian personality: the nature is the great power which we have to submit to, but the living being is there to be dominated by us.

However, we can hardly close the topic of the authoritarian personality without talking about a problem that is cause for a lot of misunderstandings. When recognition of authority is masochism and its practice sadism, does that mean that all authority contains something pathological? This question fails to make a very significant distinction between rational and irrational authority. Rational authority is the recognition of authority based on critical evaluation of competences. When a student recognizes the teacher’s authority to know more than him, then this a reasonable evaluation of his competence. The same is the case, when I as the passenger of a ship recognize the authority of the captain to make the right and necessary decisions if in danger. Rational authority is not based on excluding my reason and critique but rather assumes it as a prerequisite. This does not make me small and the authority great but allows authority to be superior where and as long it possesses competence.

Irrational authority is different. It is based on emotional submission of my person to another person: I believe in him being right, not because he is, objectively speaking, competent nor because I rationally recognize his competence. In the bonds to the irrational authority, there exists a masochistic submission by making myself small and the authority great. I have to make it great, so that I can — as one of its particles — can also become great. The rational authority tends to negate itself, because the more I understand the smaller the distance to the authority becomes. The irrational authority tends to deepen and to prolong itself. The longer and the more dependent I am the weaker I will become and the more I will need to cling to the irrational authority and submit.

All the great dictatorial movements of our times were (and are) based on irrational authority. Its driving forces were the submissive individual’s feeling of powerlessness, fear, and admiration for the “leader.” All the great and fruitful cultures are founded on the existence of rational authority: on people, who are able to muster the given functions intellectually and socially and have therefore no need to appeal to irrational desires.

But I do not want to close without emphasizing that the individual’s goal must be to become his own authority; i.e. to have a consciousness in moral issues, conviction in questions of intellect, and fidelity in emotional matters. However, the individual can only have such an inner authority if he has matured enough to understand the world with reason and love. The development of these characteristics is the basis for one’s own authority and therefore the basis for political democracy.

Summary and Commentary of the Above Passage

The controller and the controlled share an “inability to rely on one’s self, to be independent . . . to endure freedom.” Take Myron, the 50-something man-child who lives with his mother in Carson. Both mother and son fear freedom. Myron is the controlled; his mother is the controller. Neither are "living the dream."

Both controller and controlled are needy people; they cling to other.

They’re clingers.

Clingers don’t know boundaries. Myron and his mother don't understand boundaries. This lack of boundaries is discussed in a book, The Fantasy Bond. This is a book about people who grew up with no boundaries because their parents didn't teach them any. At work, in the realm of friendship, in the realm of romance, in the realm of consumerism, whatever the case may be, clingers cross boundaries and this crossing of boundaries is both self-destructive and burns bridges with other people. As a result, clingers are lonely people. And the lonelier they are, the more they cling, and the more they cling, the lonelier they become. Thus they agonize in a vicious cycle.

Clingers are unable to love and reason. Clingers are driven by unconscious impulses, the need to overcome their loneliness through grandiosity, braggadocio, conspicuous consumption, and other obnoxious demonstrations, which leave them lonelier than before.

Clingers fail to see the deep irony of their lives: They cling in the universal attempt to connect with the world and other people, but their lives are marked by failed connections.

Disconnected from the world, clingers live inside their head. As a result, they are solipsists.

The authoritarian personality, or controller, has not reached maturity. He cannot love and reason. We can infer that to be able to love and reason is Fromm’s definition of maturity.

Unable to love and connect with others, the authoritarian clings to others by forging symbiotic relationships.

Symbiotic relationships are a sick, dysfunctional, crippling mutual interdependence between controllers and controlled.

The fathers in the two stories "Cleanness" and "Caterpillars" are misanthropes posing as humanitarians. Unable to love and reason, they bully and control others. Disconnected from the world, the two fathers live in fear and hide their fear behind a veneer or facade of supreme authority.

The Opposite of the Authoritarian

The Healthy Personality Undergoes a Maturity Process Called Individuation

We are born with strong ties to our mothers and fathers, according to Fromm, and if our parents love us, they give us the security to leave them emotionally, to become separate from them and forge our own identity. For Fromm, we must leave our parents with the assurance they give us, create a separate identity, and connect with the world. This is Fromm's definition of individuation and for him individuation is synonymous with freedom.

Too many people never leave the womb, the security blanket of mother or the need to appease the demands of the father. Constantly seeking Mother's security and Father's approval, these people remain children and they never achieve individuation. Without a separate identity and lacking the freedom and security to connect with the outside world, these people often seek mechanisms of escape, false paths to power such as authoritarianism, the need to control others as compensation for a lack of individuation.

Reviewing Individuation

1. We must cut our ties with our parents eventually and experience freedom: Part of this freedom is the terror of separateness and aloneness.

2. The solution to our being alone is individuation, connecting with the world without our parents.

3. To fail to achieve individuation is to seek to escape the burden of our freedom.

4. A common escape from freedom is authoritarianism, the need to completeley control another or the need to submit completely to another.

Characteristics of the Authoritiarian Personality

1. No sympathy or empathy for the human race as the AP is absorbed by his ego, a compensation for the fear that results from being disconnected from the world.

2. The AP acts in control but he has never successfully left the womb, the mother; as a result, he bullies others who he makes submit to him and act as a mother figure.

3. The AP feeds off others in symbiotic relationships in which integrity and dignity of the individuals is abolished.

4. The AP cannot bear freedom because he is alone and fearful, having never successfully achieved individuation, the growing up process from leaving the womb.

5. The AP craves complete power to pacify his fear of disconnection but no amount of power is ever enough.

6. The AP is a sadist who craves complete control over the masochist, a willing submissive partner. This is a symbiotic relationship.

Write an introduction in which you provide an anecdote about an authoritarian you knew or once encountered.

Thesis

One of my students described her first grade teacher, a cruel woman, who delighted in insulting her students at every opportunity. One morning she had her students make "ties" out of construction paper and loop the ties around their necks so that the "tie" dangled before their torsos. Whenever the kids answered her questions incorrectly, she'd get out a huge pair of scissors and cut a tip of the "tie" while explaining, "These ties are your brains. Every time I cut off a piece, I'm showing you how small your brains are." The teacher was eventually fired from her job as her authoritarian personality proved to be a malignat force in the classroom.

Indeed, this malignant authoritian personality is demonstrated in James Lasdun's short story collection It's Beginning to Hurt. Roland's father in "Cleanness" and Luke's father Craig in "Caterpillars" embody a specific aspect of the Irrational Mind, the authoritarian personality, evidenced by ___________, _______________, ____________, and ______________.

Review:

The corruption of fatherly love in the two stories "Cleanness" and "Caterpillars" is evidenced by

do-gooder mentality disguising misanthropy

impeding individuation of family members to assert control over them

asserting perfectionist standards over others to maintain control

raging egotism that kills empathy and kindness for the human race

creating symbiotic relationships with family members to assert control over them

Review of Love Is a Demonic Form of Madness Theme in James Lasdun's short stories (Essay Option

Begin with a story of "an insane, demonic love ride" to introduce your topic:

About ten years ago my four friends were driving from their homes in Bakersfield to attend a Los Angeles Dodgers game. As they were riding over the steepest ascent of the Grapevine, they saw on the side of a road a smoldering, overheated vintage Volkswagen van. Standing outside of the van were four giddy, nubile, beautiful women, all Grateful Dead followers, “Dead Heads.” Even though their orange rusted van was near ruin, the sun-darkened hippies were still giddy from partying and they greeted their rescuers by waving their tie-dye bikini tops and spaghetti-strap tank tops in the air like glorious semaphores.

My four friends helped cool off the girls' van’s steaming engine and spent the next hour making the van road-ready. The women were grateful for my friends’ help and invited the young men to accompany them to Santa Barbara for its annual Summer Solstice Festival. These were attractive women, the men told me, earthy goddesses who, abjuring perfume, wafted the natural-producing odors of musk and desire.

But as much as my friends wanted to join these Priestesses of Unbridled Desire, they had already bought their Dodgers tickets and were determined to catch the game, so after profusely thanking the women for their kind offer, the four apologetic men rode off to Los Angeles, leaving the glowing, irrepressible pixies behind.

Years later my friends do not remember the Dodgers game, but they are still haunted by all the “what ifs?” that accompany their stupid refusal to go with the harvest maidens to the Solstice Festival. Whenever they tell the story, they argue with one another over who was at fault for insisting that they go to the Dodgers game. Their demeanors change during these accusations. They become beastly, red-faced, and seem to be foaming at the mouth. Even ten years later, the mere discussion of their lost opportunity with the smoldering temptresses reduces them to snarling, contentious animals. Bitter and resentful, they’re still possessed by all the unfulfilled possibilities that titillate their imagination and prevent them from sleeping in the deep of the night. They complain of insomnia, night flashes, half-conscious visions of splendorous encounters with those Bacchanalian nymphs. Chained to the memory of an unfulfilled opportunity, they can not live in the present and as such they treat their girlfriends, quite attractive in their own right, with flagrant disregard. After all, their hearts are still trapped in a time warp—that fateful day they encountered the van of sun-drenched sirens and repelled their invitation to ecstasy. My four friends cannot forgive themselves for their stupidity. They still hurl accusations toward one another. Each is to blame for declining the invitation and going to some stupid baseball game. In short, my friends are eternally miserable, still unable to live in the here and now because their minds and souls remain fixated on that hot summer day when tie-die bikini tops fluttered in the wind like the undulating gleam of a paradise now forever out of their reach.

In similar fashion, the characters in James Lasdun's short story collection It's Beginning to Hurt suffer from demonic, misguided passions that thwart their ability to love. In fact, the "love stories" in the collection are not really love stories at all. Rather they are displays of a demonic acute form of madness rife with ________________, ________________, _______________, and ______________________.

Classroom Activity

In the thesis above, fill in the mapping components.