In the Trials of Alice Goffman by Gideon Lewis-Kraus, he discusses her debut book “On the Run” which is a book about the lives of African American men in a low-income neighborhood in West Philidelphia. In the article, he expresses to us the feelings of fellow sociologists that feel as though Alice, a well-off, educated white woman, has no right to write about or speak on the behalf of low-income black men. In this article, Gideon introduces us to three quotes back to back from Alice Goffman’s book but ends the paragraph there without explaining anything further about the quotes. Although the explanation was lacking, in my opinion, the introduction to the quotes was well written and got the point across. Based on what I read in the chapter, if I could suggest a change it would be to follow the quote with an explanation because who wants a sandwich with no bread on the bottom am I right? I think adding this to the end of the paragraph would just overall complete the paragraph and make the point he was trying to get across clearer to the readers, rather than just listing off the quotes and ending the paragraph with a “hit and run.”
In my high school English classes, we did quite a bit of quoting in our essays, but we were never actually given any direction on how to do it correctly. Although I was aware that you had to do a quotation sandwich in order to correctly get the point across, I did not know that there was a correct or incorrect way to do it. I typically would introduce the quote by saying something like “and this is what he said…” which I now realize is incorrect. Also, I never quite took into consideration the message the length of my quotes could give out to a reader. According to They Say, I say, if you underquote it makes you look “lazy” and if you overquote, it looks like you “lack confidence in your ability to comment on the quote or just don’t understand” (p.43). Now that I have read that it really makes sense to me and I wish that someone could have taught me that sooner. Usually, my average quote size would be between 1 to 2 sentences sometimes 3, but there have been many cases where there would be more or less and I was never told otherwise.
