In high school, an underclassman complimented my writing. I was a junior or a senior and he pointed out how well I incorporated a quote into what I was writing. The quote was cited but if it hadn't been you wouldn't have necessarily known I was quoting anything. I'm not sure this is the best type of writing, but it is something I miss when reading students' writing these days. When I taught at the college level, I saw how often students would drop quote without any sort of introduction. I've done that a fair amount in this "radioheadhead" series but that's for artistic reasons. In good writing, at least in my opinion, you introduce all your quotes. For example:
1) Thom Yorke sings, "You do it to yourself."
2) Kurt Vonnegut writes, "Strictly speaking, I was rewriting an old play of mine. But that old play had been written by a right-handed stranger fifteen years my junior."
It's funny what making this an important part of writing prioritizes. Suddenly, you want to know every possible way to say "says." If the person is doing something else than just saying something, you use that. So they sing or they write. In less fanciful moments, they state, they consider, they relate, they find. It's a weird thing to focus so much time on but it feels important.
After writing "You," I had my dad read the prose poem. It's very compounded. It's saying a lot of different things at once. I think it's good and expresses how I feel about things but my dad's reaction was "Oh, it's a poem? That makes sense then, I don't get poetry." I wanted to take "radioheadhead" back in the other direction here so this is what you get.
