Incorporating Another Author’s Words and Ideas into Your Essay

Below is the beginning of my summary-and-response essay that responds to Collier’s essay, Anxiety: Challenge By Another Name. Note how my essay’s paragraphs #2 and #3 blend Collier's words and then continue with my response.  (My paragraphs are incomplete but this example shows the process.)

My Essay

¶ thesis James Lincoln Collier in his essay “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name” shares his experiences with anxiety from his college years through his present life. According to Collier, these experiences have taught him three valuable rules about anxiety and its potential either to do us harm or good. I, too, have witnessed or survived many anxious times and can easily apply Collier’s three rules to my own experience.

¶two His first rule regarding anxiety is “do what makes you anxious, don’t do what makes you depressed” (Collier 35). He discovered this rule as a result of his turning down a college friend’s invitation to visit a ranch in Argentina during a summer vacation. I discovered this rule in much the same way. When I was a child, my aunt offered to take my brother and me on a trip to . . . . continue paragraph

¶three Teaching his son to swim led Collier to his second rule about anxiety, “You’ll never eliminate anxiety by avoiding things that caused it” (36). According to Collier, his son was very anxious about the water when first learning to swim. However, instead of avoiding what made him anxious, he practiced swimming every day. In time, his son’s anxiety about water was reduced and eventually extinguished through repetition and practice, through facing his fears. My colleague at work had a similar experience. She entered college wanting to become an insect biologist. Unfortunately, she was terrified of spiders. Instead of avoiding this fear, she applied for a work-study job in the arachnid lab. The first few weeks tending to the spiders in the lab were terrifying. But as time went on, she developed a greater level of comfort with them. Eventually she was able to. continue paragraph

¶four third rule from Collier’s essay plus application

¶conclusion

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MLA Citation:

Collier, James Lincoln. “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name.” Reader’s Digest Sept. 1997: 35-37