- Engaging with others’ views is important in academic writing for many reasons. First of all, it can teach you some lessons. If you are using quotes wrong, they can show you the right way to do it. You can learn that “a writer needs to indicate clearly not only what his or her thesis is, but also what larger conversation that thesis is responding to.” This can introduce your topic more clearly which can make it so that your paper starts off strong. Another example of the importance of engaging with others’ views in academic writing is that you should ” start with “what others are saying””, because the quotes you start with from what others are saying will help you prove your point faster. In my senior high school English class, we would be assigned a reading to analyze and we’d have to come in and have an argument that we would either disagree upon or support as a class and come up with a thesis.
- When starting with what others’ are saying, it brings up the fact that there could be tension with what you’re writing. It may contradict your argument but from my experience sometimes that tension can help me back up my point and make a valid point in what I believe. You can either use what others are saying to prove your point or you can use what others are saying to back up why you think opposite of what they are saying. I often used what others were saying to help back up what I believed but there were a couple times in high school where I used what others said to back up why I disagreed.
- A recommendation that he uses to help with quotations is “you need to insert it into what we like to call a “quotation sandwich””, which I used in high school a lot. When I was unsure on how to insert a quote into a piece of writing I used this method. I never called it a “quotation sandwich” but I used it quite often.
