Compare two sentences from a letter about a town's plan to cut down the elms on Main Street. "The elms on Main Street were planted in 1936." "The elms on Main Street are worth more to this town than the parking spaces that would replace them." You could settle the first by checking the town's records. A reasonable person could deny the second, so the writer owes you a defense of it. Reading an argument closely starts with sorting its sentences this way: what the writer wants you to accept, and what the writer offers to make you accept it.
Claims: statements that need a defense
A claim is an assertion that a reasonable reader could dispute, which is why the writer has to support it. A fact can be checked: a date, a measurement, a count, an event that happened. The quick test is whether a thoughtful person could disagree, or whether the question would be settled by looking it up. Claims usually carry a judgment you can spot in the wording:
- value: "worth more," "unfair," "the best," "a mistake";
- cause and effect: "because," "leads to," "is responsible for";
- prediction: "is likely to," or "will" about an outcome nobody can know yet (a vote that is merely scheduled for March 9 is a checkable fact; how it will turn out is a prediction);
- recommendation: "should," "must," "ought to."
Writers convey their positions through claims, and most arguments have more than one. A writer arguing that the town should keep its elms might claim that the trees cool the street, that shoppers prefer shaded sidewalks, and that the extra parking wouldn't bring more business. Each of those is a supporting claim, defended in its own paragraph or sentences, and together they hold up the main position. (Unit 2 covers the overarching thesis and how it can preview an argument's structure.)
A claim can also be implied: the writer never states it, but the passage plainly leads there. A writer who describes a shaded block of busy shops and then a treeless block of empty storefronts, and stops, has claimed that shade brings shoppers without writing the sentence. Questions that ask what an author "suggests" or "implies" want that unstated claim, and the right answer is one that specific lines support and that goes no further than they do.
Claims that drive arguments are the ones that need defending. "Trees provide shade" is true and dull, and no one argues about it. "The town is about to trade its most valuable public asset for forty parking spaces" provokes a reader, and the rest of the letter has to earn it. When you are hunting for a writer's claim, skip the sentences everyone would accept; the claim is the sentence that makes the evidence necessary.
Evidence: what the writer offers
Evidence is anything a writer offers to make a claim believable. AP names many kinds. The table uses the elm letter for every row, so you can see how each kind works on the same claim.
| Kind | What it is | In the elm letter |
|---|---|---|
| Fact | A checkable statement | The town council voted 4 to 3 to remove the trees. |
| Statistic | A number that measures how much or how often | Sidewalk temperatures under the elms run about 10 degrees cooler in July. |
| Example | One case that stands for a general point | The bakery on the shaded block has had a line out the door every summer Saturday. |
| Illustration | An extended example or an imagined case worked out in detail | Picture a family at noon in August, choosing between the bare block and the shaded one. |
| Detail | A specific particular that makes a point concrete | The bark of the oldest elm still carries the initials carved by a 1940s couple. |
| Anecdote | A short story about a particular event | Last summer an elderly man fainted on the bare block and was helped into the shade. |
| Personal experience | Something that happened to the writer | "I have walked to work on Main Street for twenty years." |
| Personal observation | Something the writer noticed, often repeatedly | "On hot days I see people cross the street to walk on the shaded side." |
| Testimony | The account of someone who was there or is affected | A shop owner on the bare block says her sales fall on the hottest days, when shoppers keep to the shaded side. |
| Expert opinion | The judgment of someone with relevant expertise | The county arborist states the elms are healthy and could live another fifty years. |
| Analogy | A comparison to a different case that shares the key feature | Tearing out the trees for parking is like selling the piano to buy a bigger bench. |
| Experiment | A test in which the writer or someone else changed one thing and measured the result | A class placed thermometers on both blocks for a week and recorded the difference. |
No kind of evidence is best in general; each does some work well and has a limit. A statistic shows how widespread or how large something is, and only matters if the reader trusts how it was measured. An anecdote makes a point vivid and human, but one case can't prove a pattern. An expert opinion carries weight only within the expert's field: an arborist on the trees' health, not on parking revenue. An analogy persuades by making an unfamiliar case look like a familiar one, and it fails wherever the two cases differ in a way that matters. When an exam question asks what a piece of evidence "serves to" do, the answer names both its kind and its job.
Reasoning: how evidence becomes support
Evidence doesn't prove anything on its own. "Sidewalks under the elms are about 10 degrees cooler in July" is a measurement. It supports "keep the elms" only once the writer adds the link: people choose where to walk on hot days, and Main Street's shops depend on people who walk past them. That linking explanation is the reasoning. Sometimes a writer states it outright; often the reader has to supply it, and a good reader notices when it is missing.
Explaining how evidence supports a claim, which is what this skill asks of you, means stating that link in a sentence: "The temperature figure supports the claim because it gives shoppers a concrete reason to prefer the shaded block, which matters to a street that lives on foot traffic." If you can't write that sentence, the evidence may be true and still fail to support the claim. A writer who cites the elms' age to argue they increase sales has offered a fact with no route to the conclusion.
Some claims are defended by reasoning with little or no evidence: an appeal to a principle the audience already holds ("a town should not destroy what it cannot replace in our lifetimes") or a logical consequence ("if the council values foot traffic, it cannot also want a street too hot to walk"). Recognizing that a passage argues from principle rather than from data is itself an answer to many questions about how an argument works. Unit 3 covers how claims and reasoning link into a full line of reasoning.
Whose words are these?
Writers bring other people's words into their arguments in three ways. A quotation reproduces the exact words, in quotation marks. A paraphrase restates a specific passage in the writer's own words, at about the same level of detail. A summary condenses a longer text or a whole position to its main point. All three are embedded in the writer's own sentences, usually with a signal phrase that names the source: "as the county arborist told the council," "the mayor insists," "according to the parking study."
Writers quote when the exact wording matters: it is vivid, it carries authority, or the writer is about to take it apart. They paraphrase or summarize when they need the idea but not the phrasing, or when a long source has to fit in a sentence.
The reading skill here is keeping voices apart. A writer who quotes someone is not necessarily agreeing. Often the quotation is the view the writer is about to answer, and the signal verb tells you which: "the arborist found" and "the study shows" lend the source authority; "the mayor insists," "supporters would have us believe," and "we are told" keep it at arm's length. On the exam, a choice that attributes a quoted opponent's view to the author is wrong.
Worked examples
Label each numbered sentence as a claim, evidence (name the kind), reasoning, or a reported view, and identify the main claim.
(1) Our school should keep its twenty-minute silent reading period. (2) Last spring the student council's survey found that 61 percent of students read nothing outside of school assignments. (3) For those students, silent reading is the only time all week they read something they chose. (4) Some teachers argue that the minutes would be better spent on test review. (5) But a reader who chooses the book keeps reading, and stamina built on a novel carries over to a timed passage on a test. (6) Ms. Ruiz, who has taught ninth-grade English for eighteen years, says her strongest test-takers are almost always the students who bring a book to silent reading.
Show solution
- (1) Main claim. It recommends ("should"), and people could disagree, as sentence 4 shows.
- (2) Evidence: statistic. It is checkable, and it shows how widespread the problem is.
- (3) Supporting claim and reasoning. It draws a conclusion from (2) and states why the number matters: the period is these students' only chosen reading. Someone could dispute it (perhaps they read on their phones), so it is a claim, not a fact.
- (4) Reported view (counterargument). "Some teachers argue" signals that this is not the writer's position. A reader who took it for the writer's claim would misread the whole paragraph.
- (5) Reasoning. It answers (4) by linking chosen reading to test performance, the teachers' own concern. It offers no evidence, only an explanation of cause.
- (6) Evidence: expert opinion. Ms. Ruiz is giving a judgment, not reporting one event she witnessed, and her eighteen years of teaching ninth-grade English are what give that judgment weight. It supports (5). Its limit: one teacher's impression is not a measurement, and the students who bring books may be strong readers for other reasons.
Notice that the writer's evidence sits on both sides of the counterargument: the statistic supports the main claim directly, and the teacher's expert opinion supports the reply to the objection.
A writer claims: The town should move its weekly farmers' market from Tuesday morning to Saturday morning. Explain how each piece of evidence below supports the claim, and identify which one supports it least.
- Three of the market's eleven vendors have said they would leave if the market stays on Tuesday.
- The town's community center is closed on Saturdays.
- A count by market volunteers found 140 shoppers on a Tuesday in June, while the Saturday craft fair held in the same lot drew about 600 people.
Show solution
1 (testimony). It supports the claim by showing a cost of the current day: losing vendors shrinks the market. The link is that a market with fewer stalls draws fewer shoppers, which makes the problem worse each week.
3 (statistic, from a count). It supports the claim most directly. The link is that the Saturday crowd at the same location shows how many people are free and willing to come on a weekend morning, compared with the Tuesday turnout. Its limit is that the craft fair and the market draw for different reasons, so the 600 is a sign of potential, not a forecast.
2 (fact) supports the claim least. It is true and about Saturday, but the writer gives no link between the community center and the market. Unless the market depends on the center (for parking, restrooms, or power), the fact has no route to the conclusion. A reader asked whether the evidence supports the claim should say so rather than assume a connection the passage doesn't make.
The following passage is an original essay written for this lesson. It is set in 1912: a physician writes it for a magazine read by schoolteachers.
Our superintendent of schools, a careful man with the coal bill, informs us that "an open window in January is money thrown into the street." He is not wrong about the coal. He is wrong about the bill, for he has added up only the half of it that the school pays.
Last winter, by leave of the principal, the teachers of two rooms at the Larch Street school opened their windows for five minutes at the top of every hour, while the teachers of two rooms of the same grades kept theirs shut as usual. Between December and March the open rooms lost 212 pupil-days to colds and sore throats; the closed rooms lost 497. A pupil kept at home learns nothing, and in many of the homes I visit, a mother kept home to nurse him earns nothing.
I do not ask the superintendent to heat the street. I ask him to count what the closed window costs in a currency his ledger does not record.
Question 1. Which of the following best states the main claim the author defends?
- (A) Opening classroom windows in winter wastes coal.
- (B) The costs of keeping classroom windows shut outweigh the cost of the coal saved.
- (C) Pupils at the Larch Street school miss too many days of school.
- (D) The superintendent should be replaced by someone less concerned with money.
Question 2. The figures in the second paragraph serve primarily to
- (A) show that the superintendent's estimate of the coal bill is too high
- (B) provide the results of a comparison that supports the author's view of what closed windows cost
- (C) illustrate how many pupils attended the Larch Street school
- (D) establish the author's expertise as a physician
Question 3. The author quotes the superintendent in the first paragraph primarily in order to
- (A) present a position that the author partly grants and then argues is incomplete
- (B) offer expert testimony in support of the author's argument
- (C) show that the superintendent opposes all spending on schools
- (D) mock the superintendent's choice of words
Show solution
1. (B). The essay's claim is the reframed "bill": closed windows cost pupils' learning and families' wages, which the coal savings don't cover. The last paragraph states it as a request to count that cost. (A) is the superintendent's view, which the author only partly grants ("not wrong about the coal"), so choosing it confuses a reported view with the author's. (C) is a fact the evidence implies, not the claim it serves. (D) goes beyond the text; the author calls the superintendent "careful" and asks him to recount, not to resign.
2. (B). The paragraph describes an experiment: two rooms with open windows, two matched rooms without, and the absence counts that resulted (212 against 497). Its job is to supply evidence for the hidden cost. The reasoning that links the numbers to the claim is in the next sentence: absent pupils learn nothing, and parents lose wages. (A) is wrong because the figures are about illness, not coal. (C) misreads them as enrollment. (D) names something the paragraph never does; the author's profession comes from the introduction, and the figures would carry the same weight from a teacher.
3. (A). "He is not wrong about the coal" concedes part of the quoted position, and "he has added up only the half of it" calls it incomplete. That is the essay's whole structure in two sentences. (B) mistakes whose view this is: the quotation is a view the author answers, not support. (C) overstates; the superintendent is concerned with one cost, not all spending. (D) misreads the tone; the author plays on the superintendent's own image of money thrown into the street ("I do not ask the superintendent to heat the street") to answer it, not to ridicule it.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Reading questions on this skill ask what an author claims or implies, what a passage or paragraph's main point is, which statement a passage best supports, and what a piece of evidence or a quotation "serves to" do or is "primarily" for. Two kinds of wrong choice to watch for: the reported view the author argues against, and a statement that is true of the passage but is evidence rather than claim. In the rhetorical analysis essay, you need the writer's claims straight before you can explain the choices that support them; Topic 1.4 covers writing your own claims and supporting them with evidence.
Check yourself
Question 1
In an article about a proposed bike lane on Grant Avenue, which of the following sentences is a claim rather than a fact?
- A
The proposed lane would run 1.4 miles, from the river to the train station.
- B
The city council will vote on the proposal on March 9.
- C
A protected lane would make Grant Avenue safer for everyone who uses it, drivers included.
- D
Grant Avenue currently has four lanes for cars and no lane for bicycles.
Show answer
C
C makes a judgment about cause and effect that a reasonable person could dispute (some drivers would argue a narrower road is less safe for them), so the writer would have to defend it. The others can be checked against a plan, a calendar, or the street itself. B is tempting because it looks ahead, but a scheduled vote is a checkable fact.
- A
Question 2
An essay argues that a city should keep its historic stone bridge open to cars. The writer says: "Closing the bridge to save it is like never driving your grandfather's car so it will last forever: it lasts, and no one remembers why it mattered." This sentence functions primarily as
- A
a statistic showing how many people use the bridge
- B
an analogy suggesting that a landmark kept from use loses the value that made it worth keeping
- C
expert testimony about the bridge's structural condition
- D
a concession that the bridge cannot safely carry traffic
Show answer
B
The sentence compares the bridge to a familiar case to make a point about use and value, which is what an analogy does. D is tempting because it mentions saving the bridge, but the writer is arguing against closing it, not granting that it is unsafe. An analogy's limit is that the two cases may differ: a bridge carrying traffic wears in ways an occasional drive does not.
- A
Question 3
A writer claims that a town library should add evening hours. As evidence, the writer reports that 70 percent of the town's adults work during the library's current hours, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Explain how this evidence supports the claim, in one or two sentences.
Show answer
The statistic shows that 70 percent of adults are at work during the library's current hours, so most of them cannot use it during the workday. Evening hours would reach the people the current schedule shuts out, which is why the number supports adding them.
Explaining support means stating the link between the evidence and the claim, here that a schedule overlapping the workday excludes working adults. Repeating the number or calling it convincing does not explain anything.
Question 4
A passage includes this sentence: "The developers would have us believe that the new mall will bring a thousand jobs to the valley." What does the phrase "would have us believe" tell you about the author's position on the jobs claim?
Show answer
The author doubts or rejects it. The phrase reports the developers' claim while keeping it at a distance, signaling that the author is about to challenge it rather than endorse it.
Signal phrases show stance. Neutral or approving verbs ("shows," "found") lend a source authority, while "would have us believe" marks a view the author doesn't accept. A reader who takes the thousand jobs as the author's own claim misreads the passage.