Writing research is a contribution to academia. This should not be a mere regurgitation of facts and ideas from scholars and specialists. As educators, we need to teach students to realize that they need to have their own intuitions about source materials. They must engage in dialogue with the sources they consult. Without this dialogue their research makes no sense and becomes a mere exercise in collection and organization. We must make the distinction between reporting and research. Writing a report is objective writing; writing a research paper is subjective writing. Research is not simply finding information: it is processing information. Researching a topic requires filtering sources through a unique point of view. Searching is a dynamic brain activity; reporting is mechanical. Reporting is a revisiting of the ideas found; it is not an analysis of the ideas found. Even if reporting involves gathering information. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Students must break down texts for detail, recognize them as relevant to their focus on a particular topic, and then bring them together under the overarching thesis idea. The document itself is a balancing act between interpretation and evidence. We do not ask for opinions separate from the evidence. We do not ask for evidence separate from what we no longer call opinion, but interpretation. An academic argument is a mixture of evidence and interpretation. Many student essays are heavy-handed on one side or the other: that is, they are largely opinions without any basis in sources of information, or they are simply a literal, factual restatement of the source material without any insight. These unbalanced essays need to be discussed with students so that they recognize the favor of one over the other in their writing. Students should be encouraged to overcome the temptation to simply copy information from secondary sources, because understanding is more likely to be achieved if they paraphrase and summarize. If they can express the information in their own words (paraphrasing and summarizing), they are demonstrating that they understand that information. Paraphrasing and summarizing takes more effort than quoting. Copying is easy. Students often copy entire pages (which they could have photocopied and pasted into their journals more easily and with the same success in terms of increasing understanding of the content). Of course, in the electronic age, cutting and pasting is a simple task. If, in a hurry, a student forgets to cite the source of the quotes (cut and pasted material), he is plagiarizing.