Engaging others views is incredibly important for a number of reasons. The first of which being that it forces you to challenge your own views. It is incredibly easy to write a paper or speech without any challenge and only focus on the view points that you know, but once you receive challenge from someone or something else, it can be extremely beneficial, as it opens up a world of responses and other view points from another perspective. Another reason engaging with others is important is you can start with the, “they say” perspective. Meaning, you can start whatever work you’re doing by addressed the points of others and then moving onto yours, which will strengthen your writing and argument.
It would seem ambitious, and would be hard to perfect, but you could potentially relate your starting claim or thesis to the others work. You could use a counter point or argument to strength your thesis without sacrificing having it at the start. This would allow you to address claims right off the bat, while also strengthening your argument by then quickly moving onto your points and allowing for your argument to get stronger.
Quoting someones exact words allows for a strong quotation and further analysis of the quote. This means that you use only their words and do not try to insert anything extra to supplement your claim. Leaving it alone and being able to analyze the pure quote allows for good work. I did this plenty of times throughout high school, and we were forced to take numerous quotes out of books and analyze them, and I always made sure to use the exact words so I could be successful.
