Quotation and Paraphrasing from Timothy Barranco’s Essay

The Timothy’s essay mainly talks about the usage of languages in Instant Message and its effects on people, especially teenagers.

After reading this paper, I realize that the author quotes a lot in his paper and most of quotations come from surveys and researches. For instance, when he argues that students could hardly use txt language in formal writings, he directly lists some data from Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis from the university of Toronto, written as “the use of short forms, abbreviations, and emotional language is infinitesimally small, less than 3% of the data” (Tagliamonte and Denis 24).In my point of view, the reason why the author does so is that the statistic here shows much details about how low level of effects the IM spelling makes to young students. Obviously, using the original data here is much better than just listing several opinions from the researchers.

On the contrary, comparing to the amount of quotations, the numbers of paraphrasing looks like small corners of a huge iceberg because I only found two paraphrasing in the paper. For example, the author paraphrases some scholars’ opinion toward the benefit of txt spelling as “some scholars have noted that the popularity of txt can recall poetic examples of non-standard spelling (Shortis).” I think the author wants to extract the main point from the original theory which may be complex in order to make readers understand his opinion.

Each Corn Has Two Sides

It is convincing that different people take different sights into the same thing, just as an old saying goes, “every corn has its two sides”. When writing about the history, in my opinion, no matter winners or losers, they will more or less trend to hide some truth, which is negative to them, and exaggerate parts of the positive points. There are no more good examples than wars.

For instance, in the Asian battle fields during the World War II, the Japanese government organized by militarist invaded most parts of the East Asia and made this peaceful land full of blood. Especially in China, the Japanese soldiers did not do anything but shooting at Chinese civilian and robbing each village they passed. Millions of people had been killed and lots of cities were ruined in a sea of fires. Those scenes are what I have learned from our history books. Although we Chinese people were winners of the War with people in other part of the world, it seems like the contents of this Anti-Japanese War are a little exaggerating and compel us to agree that all modern Japanese are born to be executioners like soldiers during the War.

On the contrary, as the loser of the War, the Japanese government forced every publication to fix each corner of their history books. That is, all the truth including comments and statistics about the Anti-Japanese should be modified by the government. As a result, officials hided most facts from the young generation and made them think that Invasion was like “a visit by mistake”, as some Japanese history books said.

Above all, both the winner and the loser want the bystander to pay much attention on them. But the truth cannot always be erased or hided by exaggeration. As college students, we should hold different opinions objectively on the history, despite who is the writer, the winner or the loser.