For today’s blog post, I will be discussing the metaphor “orchestrating voices” used by Giltrow. I will also be explaining why citations are so important in academic work.

To understand the metaphor used by Giltrow, we need to break down certain meanings and analyze how they relate to the topic. Giltrow uses the metaphor “orchestrating voices”, but what does he mean by orchestrating? According to the Cambridge dictionary, orchestrating means “to organize something complicated […] especially in order to get an advantage for yourself.” With that definition, when talking about a citation we can translate that to using someone else’s work as evidence for your own. So, we can see that when giltrow uses the term voices in his metaphor, he means voices as someone else’s work which is being used for the writer’s advantage.

In class we were taught how to cite the author properly to practice academic honesty when doing academic work. But why is academic honesty so important? From the CAP workshop on academic honesty, we learned that it is crucial to cite our sources for others’ ideas in your research. I also know that it is important because of the impact your research or writing could have in a community. We were taught the different ways we could be caught up in academic dishonesty and the consequences that we could end up with.

In previous lectures we learned how citing sources is critical in academic work, not only for backing up your arguments, but to also open a discussion of your own opinions and show your own understanding of the work. An example of academic work is a summary, where you must give the author credit, show your own understanding, and state your opinions on the text. We previously did summaries about the introduction of Tangled Memories which was written by the Communication scholar Marita Sturken. As we practiced writing summaries for class, I was able to further understand the importance of citations for my work. Which when relating back to my first post, one major difference that I have noticed between university and high school, is that it is way more common to use in text citations rather than having a works cited list. As previously mentioned in my first blog post, crediting other’s work has become an automatic habit of mine because in high school my teachers always made us practice it. I personally enjoy the in text citing since it allows us to give our writing context and meaning while “orchestrating voices.”