Starting with that others say in a academic paper allows for insight into a different general consensus and allows an opening up for an argument. In high school I wrote a paper on the effects of the sympathetic nervous system on humans and was told to start my research paper on what others thought about the topic and some general stereotypes are. I avoided this tension of contradiction by doing exactly what Graff and Birkenstein say “present the argument as part of a larger conversation” (Graff and Birkenstein 21). This relieves the tension because it does not contradict your paper but it opens up room for discussion and comparison within the paper. This is the basis of academic writing.