In my final draft of my significant writing project, I realized that I used quotes from the texts to support my overall argument and the claims that I made throughout my essay. I often found that these paragraphs took the form of being TRIAC styled paragraphs. The TRIAC paragraph method includes writing a claim sentence, briefly stating the author’s background and summarizing the source, stating the quote and then analyzing it to connect back to the overall claims. Using this style of writing, helped me smoothly incorporate the quotes and my own analysis of it relating back to my thesis statement and claims.
In my free draft for the significant writing project, I selected quotes from the texts that didn’t support my claims, which made me create an incorrect interpretation of the quotes. For example, I used a quote by Jonah Lehrer which stated, “until science sees the brain from a more holistic perspective – and such a perspective might require the artistic imagination – our scientific theories will be detached from the way we see ourselves”, to describe how physical representations could help to understand complex topics. However, this quote didn’t really fit my overall argument and seemed disconnected from the whole purpose of my essay, but by looking through the text I was able to find a better quote from Lehrer’s article, which stated, “The power of a metaphor is that it allows scientists imagine the abstract concept in concrete terms, so that they can grasp the implications of their mathematical equations” (Lehrer). This quote allowed me to draw a clear and distinct connection to my thesis and the personal connection I was making in the paragraph.
Also, later in my essay I decided to integrate a quote from an unassigned text and related it to a quote from Yo-Yo Ma’s article, “Necessary Edges: Arts, Empathy, and Education”. By incorporating these two quotes in one paragraph, I was able to strengthen my claim which stated that “integrating arts and science together can lead to big advancements and can allow new technology to be developed in the field of dentistry. ” By integrating these two articles together, I was able to create a Barclay paragraph. This helped complicate my argument and allowed me to merge the commonalities between the two sources to support my thesis.
