Texts for Practicing Quoting, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing
Using the principles we have discussed, use text from the following passages for practice in quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing.
1. From Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000):
After four and a half years abroad, I returned to the United States with fresh eyes and was confronted by a series of peculiar juxtapositions. . . .
The thing that struck me as oddest was the way the old categories no longer made sense. Throughout the twentieth century it’s been pretty easy to distinguish between the bourgeois world of capitalism and the bohemian counterculture. The bourgeoisie were the square, practical ones. They defended tradition and middle-class morality. They worked for corporations, lived in suburbs, and went to church. Meanwhile, the bohemians were the free spiritiss who flouted convention. They were the artists and the intellectuals—the hippies and the Beats. In the old schema the bohemians championed the values of the radical 1960s and the bourgeois were the enterprising yuppies of the 1908s.
But I returned to an America in which the bohemian and the bourgeois were all mixed up. It was now impossible to tell an espresso-sipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker. And this wasn’t just a matter of fashion accessories. I found that if you investigated people’s attitudes toward sex, morality, leisure time, and work, it was getting harder and harder to separate the antiestablishment renegade from the pro-establishment company man. Most people, at least among the college-educated set, seemed to have rebel attitudes and social-climbing attitudes all scrambled together. Defying expectations and maybe logic, people seemed to have combined the countercultural sixties and the achieving eighties into one social ethos.
After a lot of further reporting and reading, it became clear that what I was observing is a cultural consequence of the information age. In this era ideas and knowledge are at least as vital to economic success as natural resources and finance capital. The intangible world of information merges with the material world of money, and new phrases that combine the two, such as “intellectual capital” and “the culture industry,” come into vogue. So the people who thrive in this period are the ones who can turn ideas and emotions into products. These are highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success. The members of the new information age elite are bourgeois bohemians. Or, to take the first two letters of each word, they are Bobos. (pages 9-11)
2. From “Circles of Support,” excerpted from Jane Austen Among Women by Deborah Kaplan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 96-97, 99-106, 108; rpt. in Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, A Norton Critical Edition, 3rd ed., (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 368-375:
The literary interests and pursuits of Jane Austen’s family and community explain how, as a young girl, she came to be interested in literature and to try imaginative writing, but they cannot account for Austen’s mature writing. In the second half of the 1790s Austen was becoming a serious, committed writer. We can follow the transformation by considering her productions. The majority of her juvenilia, like the works of her family and neighbors, are very brief; some mere fragments or, as she called one selection of them, “Scraps.” Most of the longer pieces are unfinished. Lady Susan, the first composition written after the juvenilia in 1793-94, while not incomplete, is brought to a quick finish with a short, tacked-on conclusion. But beginning in 1795, Austen wrote and complete three extended manuscripts: “First Impressions” [Pride and Prejudice], “Elinor and Marianne” [Sense and Sensibility], and “Susan” [Northanger Abbey] and those efforts changed the nature of Austen’s creative life, differentiating it both from her work on her earlier fictions and from the leisure-time composing of other members of the gentry. The manuscripts required sustained concentration. They took time.
We have only to remember the dictums of the widespread ideology of domesticity to appreciate the potential subversiveness of that writing. The ideal woman was to engage in activities that served her family, contributing either to the pleasures of her husband or to the education of her children. Certainly, a young girl or even an adult woman who whiled away an occasional solitary afternoon by composing a poem or by writing brief parodies could not be accused of putting herself first in an “unfeminine” way. But to write three books in four years? Although biographers and critics have routinely portrayed the charming family context for Austen’s girlhood precociousness, they have not provided a persuasive rendering of that context for the novelist’s difficult transition from play to professionalism, a transition that began in the second half of the 1790s and extended into the second decade of the nineteenth century. They have not been able to do so because they have ignored the increasing cultural pressures on females in Jane Austen’s community who were becoming adult women. (pages 369-370)
Posted by A. L. Trupe
Sept. 19, 2001