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Reading Response #2: “The Citation Sandwich Move”

Our second reading response is a chance to practice a key scholarly writing move: The “Citation Sandwich.” This three-part move is a way to fully integrate a source into your own writing, giving full context to direct quotes and explaining those quotes to your readers with analysis. For details on this concept, check out the “Citation Sandwich” handout on Canvas.

For the response, you’ll want to think about individuality and gain insight into how our cultural identities inform our experiences, values, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, and how they help us better understand the diversity and connections within society.

Identifying Individual Culture(s): Dimensions of Diversity

The primary dimensions of age, race, gender, ethnicity, (dis)abilities, sexual identity, childhood economic class and childhood religion, serve as core elements that shape our basic self-image and our fundamental view. They help form our core expectations of others in our personal and professional life. 

The secondary dimensions of culture including education, income/economic status, religious beliefs (current), relationship/parental status, geographic location, and work background serve as independent influences on our self-esteem and self-definition. This influence varies with who we are, our stage of life, and changes we have experienced. 

This sense of identity is explored by hundreds of writers, including those for our class. In her collection of writing, “Brown Album: Essays on Exile and Identity,” author Porochista Khakpour relates her relationship with a two-pronged identity as she shares, “I had tactics as a child: I hid inside the American costumes I wore – punk, cowgirl, starlet – and took on Persian only when I had to” (4). She continues, “Once in a while a baffled peer would ask: ‘But what’s Persian? Aren’t you from Iran? I’d spin the wheel in my brain and let the arrow land on the many somethings, anythings, I had cobbled…”  (4).

We now have the opportunity to explore our own identities and see the ways in which we have shaped and reshaped them, as they have us.

Getting Started 

Part 1: 

Think about 3 different dimensions that serve to shape your basic self-image. Choose from the options offered in “primary dimensions” and “secondary dimensions” listed above. Your choices could be those with which you have built confident relationships, or those that you are trying to comfortably unfold. Explain your relationship with those dimensions and why they are significant. These stories will be told with a personal and subjective voice. Please only share what you comfortable doing so. These will only be read by me.

Part 2: Choose at least two quotes from “Brown Album” that helps highlight one or more of your experiences. You may use the quotes above if you wish, or you may choose your own. There are many excellent quotes from which you may choose.

Begin your source integration by introducing the Khakpour writing for your readers. Like we’ve done previously, assume that your reader has not read the article/s. Give your readers the key info about the text, such as the full name of the writer, the title, and an overall summary of the text in your own words (basically teaching the text to your reader). Preview the idea/concept you want to quote by explaining it in your own words.

From there, bring in two direct quotes from Khakpour. Don’t forget to add a signal phrase and parenthetical citation.

After each quote, explain what you think the quote means and how you think it reflects the argument you are making about identity and/or self. Analyze in no less than 3-5 sentences, per quote.