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.