How Others’ Work Can Help You Develop Your Arguments

The previous chapter introduced you to the fundamentals of how to integrate others’ work into your essays. It stressed the importance of differentiating between your voice and the voices of others and showed how you can make use of quotations, summaries and paraphrases and also reporting verbs and phrases. This chapter builds on this by explaining how others’ work can help you develop your arguments. All of the approaches introduced play an important role in the process of knowledge creation. Remember that the creator of knowledge knows the ideas that already exist, understands how these ideas relate to one another and ultimately is able to evaluate and build upon these ideas. The approaches are ordered – roughly – from least to most challenging.