Outcome two stresses how to effectively use evidence from outside sources, with proper citations, clear summaries, quotations, and paraphrases as needed. Another important point is intertextuality—the dialogue between sources and the meaning created from their relationship. Although this outcome is probably the least captivating, it is hard to exaggerate its importance. First, intertextual ideas and evidence can be stronger than the texts that they lie between, so they are a useful resource. Second, forgetting to cite or quoting without crediting the author can, at best, be overlooked by readers. At worst, you could have that extra-paranoid professor who hits you with plagiarism accusations and consequential academic discipline.

            My MP2 suits this outcome nicely. I have my eleven sources listed alphabetically on their own Works Cited page as MLA citation formatting directs, and my parenthetical citations throughout the paper are placed with proper punctuation (i.e., periods and commas outside and to the right). In order to make things clear and to stick to the conventions of most academic writing (my specific genre was cultural studies), I introduced each source upon first mention, instead of dropping names and quotes without context.

To put sources in conversation with each other, I contrasted the different scholar’s ideas on the relationship between globalization and Cascadia in order to draw new conclusions. I set Don Alexander's simple explanation of Cascadia's attitude towards globalization in conjunction with Ingeborg Aarsand's, and use her idea to build off of Alexander's:

According to Don Alexander in his article “Bioregionalism: The Need for a Firmer Theoretical Foundation” in the Journal of Ecosophy, bioregionalism’s tenets include favoring “locally and regionally diverse cultures as guarantors of environmental adaptation, in opposition to the trend towards global monoculture” (2). Elaborating on Alexander’s claim that bioregionalism opposes this “global monoculture,” Aarsand argues that “Bioregionalism as a movement wants to reorganize and decentralize the United States into ecologically sustainable regions” (8). Thus, beyond simply opposing globalization, Cascadian bioregionalism proposes an alternative way of organizing societies that contrasts with globalized societal structures.

As I interact with the texts, I most often use quotes (as shown above) and paraphrases to incorporate ideas and evidence into my paper. I do summarize, though, when I briefly explain the main points of a chapter of Raymond Williams’ book, Marxism and Literature, in my penultimate paragraph. My quotes, as shown in the wall of text above, are always nicely cushioned and never indiscriminately dropped into the paragraph without warning.

Evidence diversity was not mentioned in class, but it is listed on the syllabus for outcome two. I cited two (but viewed many more) primary sources: the CascadiaNow website and the Cascadia subreddit. I also used two theses, at least one scholarly journal article, a dissertation, and at least two books. One of the sources I almost used was an article that I requested from the UW libraries system—it was scanned and sent to me, but it was too far outside of my genre to be of much help.

Due to my past reliance on Easybib for MLA citations, I approached the works cited page with some uneasiness and leaned heavily on the Purdue Owl examples. A few of my sources were a little bit weird to cite, like the Cascadia website (which listed very little of the criteria that Owl told me to include, like publisher or sponsor), but I did my best to follow the proper formats. 

Outcome two was pretty important for my own progress since it deals with skills that I rarely practice. I am not daunted by making citations from scratch, now. So even if it is the least enchanting of the outcomes (except for the intertextuality bit; intertextuality is cool), I got a lot out of it!