Center Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Handouts
Citation, quotation, and paraphrase: Examples and questions
Read through the extract below from a student paper and compare it to the Krugman source text on the right. How would you describe this use of source text?
The Social Security Trust Fund isn’t a big problem. Every dollar that Social Security puts in government bonds, instead of in corporate bonds, is a dollar that the federal government doesn’t have to borrow from others. If the Social Security trust fund didn’t use its surpluses to buy 1.2 trillion dollars in government bonds, that money would have had to be borrowed elsewhere. Instead of crediting the trust fund with 65 billions dollars in interest, the government would have had to pay that much or more to private companies. As Paul Krugman says, the trust fund makes a real contribution to the federal budget. The crisis that Bush claims is just not real.
Now consider the revised version below. How does it fare?
The Social Security Trust Fund isn’t a big problem. Paul Krugman notes that “every dollar that Social Security puts in government bonds,” instead of in corporate bonds, is money it doesn’t have to borrow from others. The Social Security trust fund generates surpluses that are used to buy 1.2 trillion dollars in government bonds. If Social Security didn’t generate those surpluses, that money would have to be borrowed elsewhere, probably from private companies. As Paul Krugman says, “the trust fund makes a real contribution to the federal budget.” The crisis that Bush claims is just not real.
Paul Krugman 2003 (p. 205)
…But the commission says that the government bonds in that trust fund aren’t real assets.
That’s like saying that when you paid off your nephew’s mortgage, you did nothing to improve his cash flow.
Every dollar that the Social Security system puts in government bonds—as opposed to investing in other assets, such as corporate bonds—is a dollar that the federal government doesn’t have to borrow from other sources. If the Social Security trust fund hadn’t used its accumulated surpluses to buy $1.2 trillion in government bonds, the government would have had to borrow those funds elsewhere. And instead of crediting the trust fund with the $65 billion in interest this year, the government would have had to cough up at least that much extra in actual cash interest payments to private bondholders. So the trust fund makes a real contribution to the federal budget. Doesn’t that make it a real asset?
How would you paraphrase these two sentences?
1) “The near zone energy-momentum tensor of a supersonic heavy quark jet moving through a strongly coupled N=4 super Yang-Mills (SYM) plasma is analyzed in terms of first-order Navier-Stokes hydrodynamics.”
From “Near-zone Navier-Stokes analysis of heavy quark jet quenching in an N=4 super-Yang-Mills plasma.” Jorge Noronha, Giorgio Torrieri, and Miklos Gyulassy. Physics Review C78, 2008.
2) “Encounters with registers are encounters with characterological figures stereotypically linked to speech repertoires (and associated signs) by a population of users.
From “Voice, footing, enregisterment.” Asif Agha. Journal of Lingusistic Anthropology 15(1), 2005.