Identifying Claims and Evidence
Introduced| English |
|---|
| claims/kleɪmz/ |
| evidence and/or reasoning/ˈevɪdəns ænd ɔː ˈriːzənɪŋ/ |
| syntactically embedding/sɪnˈtæktɪkli emˈbedɪŋ/ |
One test tells a claim from a fact
- "The river is 40 km long" cannot be argued with.
- "The river should be protected" can.
- Could a reasonable person disagree? is the whole test.
A fact can be checked with a ruler; a claim invites disagreement. The ruler hates public speaking.
What a claim is
- Writers convey their positions through one or more claims 主张 that require a defence.
- Effective claims provoke interest and require a defence, rather than stating an obvious fact.
- A sentence nobody would dispute is not a claim, however true it is.
Claim, evidence, or neither?
Sort each sentence by the job it does in an argument.
The test for whether a sentence is a claim is...
A true statement nobody disputes has nothing to defend and cannot anchor a paragraph.
Any true statement can serve as the claim of a paragraph.
It must require a defence — a fact nobody disputes cannot anchor an argument.
What counts as evidence
- Writers defend claims with evidence and/or reasoning 证据与推理.
- The CED's list is deliberately wide: facts, anecdotes, analogies, statistics, examples, details, illustrations, expert opinions and personal experience.
- Recognising an anecdote or an analogy as evidence is itself an examinable skill.
Select all that the CED lists as types of evidence.
The CED's list is deliberately wide, but page numbers are citation, not evidence.
A true statement is not automatically a claim. If nobody could reasonably disagree, there is nothing to defend, and a paragraph built on it has no argument to make. Apply the disagreement test before you build anything on a sentence.
Building quoted material into your own sentence is called ____ embedding.
Syntactic embedding is how source material is related to the writer's own argument.
Embedding source material
- Writers relate source material to their own argument by syntactically embedding 句法嵌入 it.
- Quoted, paraphrased or summarised material is built into the writer's own sentence.
- A quotation dropped in beside a sentence has not been related to the argument at all.
Match each part of a paragraph to what it does.
Three parts, in that order — and the third is the one most often missing.
Reading a paragraph for its parts
- Find the sentence that could be argued with — that is the claim.
- Find what is offered to support it — that is the evidence.
- Find the sentence explaining the link — if it is missing, the paragraph is incomplete.
"The library opens at nine" is a fact. "The library's opening hours fail the students who need it most" is a claim: someone could reasonably disagree, and defending it requires evidence about who uses it and when.
A claim requires a defence — test it by asking whether a reasonable person could disagree. Evidence may be facts, anecdotes, analogies, statistics, examples or expert opinion, and it must be syntactically embedded in the writer's own sentence rather than dropped beside it.