Talk:Week 3 Writing Annoyances/@comment-45042659-20200227033631

One annoyance that I have been guilty of is using two many quotations in a row. Often if I want to compare or contrast, I will find two or three conflicting statements and just go from there. This may be a good starting point for stimulating thought, but just throwing them on paper haphazardly isnt good practice.

To avoid this annoyance, I can better evaluate my usage of quotations and the purpose they are serving. As Stedman (2011) declares in Annoying Ways People Use Sources, "If you just want to use a quote to cite a fact, then consider paraphrasing or summarizing the source material".

Example:

Many experts are concerned with the dangers of AI. Elon Musk was very direct on the subject. "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess like what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that."(Musk, 2014) Bill Gates was slightly more optimistic, “The world hasn’t had that many technologies that are both promising and dangerous — you know, we had nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.”(Clifford, 2019)

While the quotations carry weight and have some impact, do they really need to be there to get the point across? Furthermore, the paragraph starts to become dominated by someone elses thoughts, more so than your own. After evaluating my usage of quotations, my fix is shown below.

Fix:

Many experts are concerned with the dangers of AI. Elon Musk described it as "our biggest existential threat"(Musk, 2014)  This may seem a bit extreme, however even the more postive critics of artificial intelligence emphasized the seriousnous of its possible effects. Bill Gates related AI to having the benfefits of nuclear energy and the dangers of nuclear weapons.(Clifford, 2019)

Brandon Martin