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English 1020
James Maxfield, Instructor
Ex. #1
Practice in Critical Reading & Paraphrasing
Instructions: Paraphrase the following quotations and passages in your own
words. Be sure to refer to section in your Handbook on paraphrasing and
my handouts before trying to complete this assignment.
- "Because our spontaneous initiative has been frustrated, too often
inadvertently, in earliest childhood we do not tend, customarily, to dare to
think competently regarding our potentials. We find it socially easier to go
on with our narrow, shortsighted specializations and leave it to
other—primarily to the politicians—to find some way of resolving our common
dilemmas." (From R. Buckminster Fuller’s Operating Manual for Spaceship
Earth, 1963, pg. 11.)
- Synergetics altogether forsakes axioms as "self-evident," premicroscope,
superficial beliefs. It predicates all its relationship explorations on the
most accurately and comprehensively statable observations regarding direct
experiences. The new set of data employed by synergetics seemingly results in
sublimely facile expression of hitherto complex relations. It makes nuclear
physics a conceptual facility comprehensible to any physically normal child."
(From R. Buckminster Fuller’s Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of
Thinking, 1975, p. 24.
- "On one hand, Shakespeare strikes most people as the inventor, the
originator, the trendsetter. On the other hand, this creative genius, this
innovator of expression, this man of letters who reshaped the English
language, has been reduced by academia to a literary ragpicker. Biographers
deliver a Shakespeare who was barely capable of an original idea, who
constantly scavenged from others and followed fashions invested by playwrights
otherwise considered second-rate." (From Diana Price’s book: Shakespeare’s
Unorthodox Biography, 2001, p. 286.)
-
"[. . .] She had
A heart—how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she like whate’er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, ‘twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broker in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace—all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked
Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody’s gift. (Browning’s "My Last Duchess," ls. 21-3)
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night,
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls all silvered o’er with white,
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard’
Then of thy beauty do I question make
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow,
And nothing ‘gainst time’s scythe can make defence
Save breed to brave him when he takes thee hence. (Shakespeare’s Sonnet
No. 12)
"And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work." (Frost,
"Out, Out—" ls. 7-12)
"Readers who spend a few hours with the poet can come to feel, after the
rich amusement and opulence of the worlds he creates, an impatience, that what
attracted the poet was a character rather than a person, a setting and a
historical period rather than abiding emotions that attach to his usually
fictional experiences." (From: Lives of the Poets by Michael Schmidt,
p. 452-53.)
"Our physical and cultural experience provides many possible bases for
spatialization metaphors. Which ones are chosen, and which are major, may vary
from culture to culture." (Metaphors We Live By. George Lakoff & Mark
Johnson, p. 19, 1980.
"(In practicing an art) the question is at one moment what tools to use,
and at another how to use them; and similarly in other spheres, we have to
consider sometimes what means to employ, and sometimes how exactly given means
are to be employed." (From: Introductory Philosophy, 2nd,
1971, Frank A. Tillman, et al. p. 180 on Aristotle)
"My ship full of forgetful cargo sails / [. . .] my master,
no, my foe, is at the helm;/
[. . .] a rain of tears, a mist of my disdain / washes and
frees those all too weary ropes / made up of wrong entwined with ignorance.
Hidden are those two rusty signs of mine: / dead in the
waves is reason as is skill, / and I despair of ever reaching port." (From:
Petrarch’s Canzoniere, #189.)
(These last lines are together as #10.)
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