While formatting my sources, I had used Little Seagull for assistance. I had structured my works cited page off this book and made changes to each citation based off which type of source I was using. I had used a variety of sources for this project, so I had to meet MLA requirements for citing and online magazine, book, and online video. All of these citations ranged in the material or order of the citation, so I used Little Seagull as a way to identify those changes. This book also had assisted me with in-text citations. My peer reviewers had comments that my in-text citation was incorrect with my inclusion of publication date, rather than page number in some instances. This is when Little Seagull had identified what I needed for the variety of sources I used for my in-text citations. With all of this assistance of this book, I was able to properly form my works cited page and correct in-text citations. For quoting within my essay, I used “They Say, I Say” to show me templates to use for framing the quote properly within my essay. I had to introduce the quote properly and explain it in the end to show the readers how and why the quote was important to my essay topic. This had previously been an issue for me, but with the help of “They Say, I Say”, I was able to fix my writing to properly integrate my sources and give some background information to the quotes while using them to develop my claims.
Example from Social Media Essay: “According to Turkle, many teens prefer to communicate through a device, rather than a personal conversation. They are able to control the engagement, talking to others when they want, and further editing the conversation they have by thinking about responses in great detail, since there’s no awkward pause between an in-person conversation. Turkle comments on this in her TED Talk to describe the features and issues that go hand-and-hand with cellular communication, “…What’s wrong with having a conversation?…it takes place in real time and you can’t control what you’re going to say…We get to edit, and that means we get to delete, and that means we get to retouch” (Turkle, 2012). Having these abilities at the tips of our fingers ultimately jeopardizes our character, and identity; by taking advantage of the space and time you have to respond in a textual conversation. Further along in Turkle’s TED talk, she makes a comment explaining the thoughts of the youth of society and the way in which they deal with the self inflicted isolation, “We are now expecting more from technology and less from each other” (2012). Society is now reaching out to social media as a way to cope with loneliness, in hopes of healing their broken identity; thinking someone is reading their posts or tweets, when this loneliness was brought on because of this social media.”
