The passage below comes from Kenneth Burke's 1969 A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press)

Question

"Aristotle had said that, particularly in the arousing of pity, the rhetorician is most effective if he can bring before the audience the actual evidence of hardship and injustice suffered. Thus, in proportion as "imagination" went up in the scale of motivational values, one might come to speak of an appeal to the imagination in many instances which classical theory might have treated as persuasion by the appeals of pathos and ethos (appeals to "emotion" and by "character" or personality," (81, Burke's emphasis).

Would you advise the speaker to quote this passage or paraphrase it? Justify your answer. What are the major differences between quoting and paraphrasing? Additionally, write two different ways you would introduce this source during your presentation.
What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

The best answers will:
1. advise the speaker to paraphrase rather than quote, explaining that because the paragraph is very long, the speaker can more efficiently explain the point through a paraphrase. Exceptional answers will also offer the counterpoint that to quote the passage directly is to marshal Burke's ethos and unique rhetorical style.
2. explain that both quoting and paraphrasing are forms of citation; because they give original authors their due diligence, both quotes and paraphrases must be handled ethically and responsibly. Not citing the original author, in either case, is plagiarism. Quoting refers to directly repeating original phrasing from a source, where paraphrasing is putting it into one's own words.
3. provide two different source introductions, such as "In his 1969 book, A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke argued…" and "Nearly 50 years ago, scholar Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives commented…" among many other possibilities.