Students must integrate material from articles into their essays. Students should remember that their audience is someone as smart as they are who does not necessarily know what the student knows. Students must not assume that the people reading their essays have read or are familiar with the articles. Instead, students must be sure to introduce a quotation or summary of the article into their essay and attach the article to their own ideas.

Using a Quotation

Let's suppose a male student was writing an essay about mythic beliefs, and he was using "Sun Creation: Brule Sioux Myth" by Richard Erdoes and Alfonzo Alex Ortiz from the first edition of the Writing on the River textbook (pages 37-44). Here are two original paragraphs from that text, page 39.

So the sacred four-direction powers breathed their life-giving breath into this earth we are sitting on. The sixteen hoops were still skeleton hoops; you could see through them, walk through, float through; they had no substance yet.

The sun again called all the powers and planets to crowd around the earth and breathe into it, and this was the beginning of the red man's life. All the powers of the universe participated in its creation, but there arrived among them in a whirlwind an unknown power right out of the center of the universes. Its name was Unknowingly, and it also breathed into the sixteen hoops. All the powers breathed fire and the other elements into this land, and when they had finished, one and a half million eons of creation had passed.

The student might use this material in a paper like this:

Of the many creation myths across the world, one explanation for how life came to be is the idea that life results from the very breath of God. In the book of Genesis, the writer explains that "the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul" (King James Bible. Gen. 2.7). In the Brule Sioux myth of creation, the forces of the universe "breathed their life-giving breath" into the earth, including an "unknown power" that, together with the other forces of the universe "breathed fire and the other elements" into creation (Erdoes and Ortiz 39).

Notice that even if readers have not read this article from the textbook, they can understand how the writer is using it.

Using Paraphrase or Summary

Students can also incorporate examples from the textbook using paraphrase or summary. Here is another section of the same essay from page 42:

The man and the woman began to communicate with each other and talked for many years. Then inside them a feeling emerged. Even before they touched each other they felt a vibration, womb understanding. So by the powers of the great sun, by the powers of Tunkashila, it was given to them to understand that they were man and woman, creators themselves. That understanding came to the man through lightning, through the sun blood that was in him, and it came to the woman through that birth cord which connects her to the moon and whose power she still feels at her moon time.

"You are the caretaker of the generations, you are the birth giver," the sun told the woman. "You will be the carrier of this universe."

The student might sumamrize the information in an essay like this:

Another common belief found in myth is that humans are like the gods because humans, too, create life. In the Brule Sioux myth, the first man and the first woman realize their human potential for creation as they talk to one another, and their creative power is recognized by the gods (Erdoes and Ortiz 42).

Final Reminder

Students must use internal citations when they include material from an article, whether quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing. They will also need to include a Works Cited listing of the sources they have used.