Annoying Ways That People, aka Me, Use Sources

Original:
"Taking the words of David Roberts in his article “Reboot or Die Trying,” I feel as if it’s a necessity to keep up with the constant “digital snow” that has inundated our online lives."

Revised:
"With a considerable amount of our daily interactions with others being conducted digitally, pressures to stay updated with our peers and the world around us has increased. David Roberts expresses this well in his article “Reboot or Die Trying,” where he describes the necessity to keep up with the constant “digital snow” that has inundated our online lives."

Why:
I believe that this paraphrasing of David Robert's article is a hybrid of the "Armadillo Roadkill" and "Dating Spider-Man" categories. The reason it falls under the first category is that I provide little to no introduction about how "digital snow" is related to the contents of my paper. As a result, there is little that the reader can infer from the paraphrase. In order to make it work with the rest of the paragraph, I added the sentence, "With a considerable amount of our daily interactions with others being conducted digitally, pressures to stay updated with our peers and the world around us has increased." This provides a supplemental piece of context that shows the reader how it should be interpreted. The reason it falls into the second category is due to the fact that I started out the paragraph with a paraphrase. Combined with the fact that I provided little context to it, it sounds abrupt and unplanned. This was also fixed by adding the new sentence before it in order to provide context.

Original:
"This necessity has led to what writer Linda Stone has named “continuous partial attention,” or the notion that we spend a considerable amount of mental energy on focusing on our digital devices, even if in a limited manner (Stone 2011)."

Revised:
"This necessity has led to what writer Linda Stone named “continuous partial attention,” or the concept that our desire to stay constantly connected to the digital world has resulted in dysfunctional behavior. These distractions take a toll on our ability to give full focus to things happening in our reality, instead diverting mental energy towards staying updated with our devices (Stone)."

Why:
There were multiple issues with the particular use of a source. The first mistake that I made was using APA format in-text citations instead of the MLA format like we were supposed to. I fixed this by removing the date from the citation. The second issue I recognized was that I didn’t paraphrase the contents of the author’s article in a way that was neither clear or useful in my paper. Consequently, the paraphrasing is almost incorrect from the author's intended purpose. To fix this, I revised how I explained the concept of "continuous partial attention" by being more detailed and adding additional material from the article. I'm not sure if this falls into any of Stedman's annoyances. If it does, my best guess is that it falls under the "Armadillo Roadkill" category, because the original paraphrasing included a minuscule amount of information that a reader could use to interpret the meaning of the term that I used.