Adding quotes to a paper increases the validity and strength of opinions being shared. When integrating a quote into your paper, you’re supposed to introduce the quote, then use the quote, and then explain what you think the quote is saying in your own words. My use of sources improved over the course of this semester. I was able to add quotes that directly supported my opinions and I was able to choose stronger sources to use in my writing. My development from using small bits of information from a source to using larger portions of a quote helped my papers drastically. In my third paper I quoted Leslie Jamison. Jamison has a very hard time empathizing with these people and says, “Is it wrong to call empathy when you trust the fact of suffering, but not the source? How do I inhabit someone’s pain without having their particular understanding of that pain” (Jamison 230)? Although she sympathizes, she believes that the patients deserve comfort and compassion and she questions how to empathize with someone showing no symptoms but feeling pain. This is one of my strongest uses for a quote this semester, I was able to take a question already asked by Jamison and integrate it into my own paper and answer the question in my own way. I was never able to integrate quotes that made sense in the context of my papers, but doing opinionated papers where I was able to express my own ideas and be given material that supports or opposes my opinion really helped me to understand the importance of sourcing.
