Do not ignore sources that seem contrary to your position or that offer interpretations different from your own. Instead, use them to give voice to opposing points of view and alternative interpretations before you counter them.

The student writer on childhood obesity uses a source to show readers that there is substance to her opponents’ position that medication is the preferable approach to treating childhood obesity.

As researchers Yanovski and Yanovski (2002) have explained, obesity was once considered “either a moral failing or evidence of underlying psychopathology” (p. 592). But this view has shifted: Many medical professionals now consider obesity a biomedical rather than a moral condition, influenced by both genetic and environmental factors. Yanovski and Yanovski have further noted that the development of weight-loss medications in the early 1990s showed that “obesity should be treated in the same manner as any other chronic disease . . . through the long-term use of medication” (p. 592).