I feel Integrating sources into my papers has been a  skill I can do quiet well. I often times used too many quotes or the quotes overpowered my voice in most papers. Developing my argument and my voice throughout my paper was a skill I’m still improving on. I must say at times it was hard to find quotes that supported my thesis as some of the articles we read were dense and had a lot of hidden meaning. I believe I struggled more with referencing in text and on the literature cited page more so then the integration of the quotes in my paper.

In class we talked a lot about ‘quote sandwiches’ which helped me when trying to integrate a quote into my ideas. I do believe at first I was picking quotes that were too lengthy and there wasn’t many of my ideas. I realized this looking back at the first paper compared to the third. I feel that I integrated my quotes and my ideas better in the third paper. An example of this:

“…In How Does Music Transform us? He talks about a moment when he played a Chopin piece for some street kids in Ireland. At the end of the performance, one kid told Zander that: “when you played that piece… I could feel the tears streaming down my face, and it felt really good to cry for my brother” (16:36 Zander). The young boy was so moved by the beauty of the music that he was brought to tears. This can also be related to the drives explained by Armstrong in ‘La Bella Vita’. Armstrong states: “This explains why beauty can be so moving- why it can make us weep. When we recognise beauty in a piece of music…we know we have neglected or betrayed and we feel an astonishing combination of anguish and delight.” The music piece offered the boy the feeling of sadness that he has neglected in the past. Even though the boy was experiencing sadness, he wasn’t upset about it; he was ok with the feeling because he found beauty in the piece and it felt good for him to cry about the death of his brother. This wasn’t the only time someone was moved to tears because of beauty.”