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Research quest: Influential people in their historical context

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  1. Your task for week 1: Your draft
    Who should you choose?
  2. How to write your draft
  3. Your task for week 2 and 3: Asking the right questions
    Asking questions about history
  4. Research in categories
  5. Your task for week 4: Paraphrasing and restating a message
    How to paraphrase
  6. How to paraphrase - your research
  7. Your task for week 5: Plagiarism and Quoting
    Standing on the Shoulders of Giants
  8. An explanation on plagiarism
  9. How to quote
  10. How to quote - your research

Let’s take the following text as a base:

“Alexander I was a master diplomat who played all sides against one another to expand his kingdom. He was a faithful subject of the Persian Empire when it suited him and a Greek patriot when the Great King turned his back. After Alexander was assassinated—a frequent event in Macedonian royal history—his son Perdiccas II continued his father’s policies of international intrigue during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. Perdiccas changed sides so many times during the conflict that the Macedonians couldn’t keep track of who they were backing during any given year.”

Philip Freeman: Alexander The Great. Simon & Schuster, p. 21.

A good quotation within a text / a lecture…

keeps the author’s name within the same sentence as the quote:

  • Freeman declares. . .
  • Freeman argues that . . .
  • Freeman believes that . . .
  • The work of Freeman shows that . . .
  • As Freeman indicates. . .
  • As Freeman implies. . .
  • As Freeman suggests. . .
  • Freeman thinks that . . .
  • Freeman addresses. . .

marks the quote with quotation marks or sets it off with its own block:

  • Freeman believes that Alexander I had been “a master diplomat who played all sides against one another to expand his kingdom”.

quotes no more material than absolutely necessary,

uses ellipsis (…) to mark that you’ve left out certain words to shorten your passage and square brackets […] to add some additional information to the quotation.

  • The work of Freeman shows that “after Alexander [had been] assassinated (…) his son Perdiccas II [had] continued his father’s policies of international intrigue during the Peloponnesian War.”

uses footnotes and endnotes to cite your sources:

  • The work of Freeman shows that “after Alexander [had been] assassinated (…) his son Perdiccas II [had] continued his father’s policies of international intrigue during the Peloponnesian War.”1Philip Freeman: Alexander The Great. Simon & Schuster, p. 21.

Move on now!

Now, please move on to the next step and an exercise – we’ll use all these techniques with your own research.

Speaking Card Sets

B1 Level (GER: Form 10)