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By Root 10380 0

Edna refers to her new home as the “pigeon house,” a place where she thinks she has evaded her husband and children. She asserts her independence in this new dwelling, throwing parties and working on her art. Perhaps the greatest reference to Edna’s tie to birds occurs right before she kills herself. Chopin portrays the scene, “A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water.” This bird comes to represent everything Edna has endured up until her breakdown, her suicide “down, down to the water.” Edna can never reconcile her natural sexual instincts, her “broken wing,” with the civilized world she inhabits; society will not let her merge the two domains, and so she resolves to die.

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WHAT DO THE FACTS REALLY TELL US?

In the realm of analysis, there are precious few smoking guns and absolutely reliable eyewitnesses. When there are, you have an open-and-shut case that probably does not need to be argued. It makes sense, then, to avoid thinking that a particular use of evidence is strong and good because the evidence is clearly true and factual, whereas another use of evidence is weak and inadequate because it’s possibly untrue and not factual. Most analytical uses of evidence are a matter of making inferences, interpreting the evidence with subtlety and respect.

To a significant extent, decisions about the value of evidence depend on the kind of claim you are making (how broad, for example, and how conclusive) and the genre you are writing in. What could be appropriate and valid for writing a magazine profile of residents trying to rebuild a poor urban neighborhood might not be appropriate and valid for supporting policy decisions or sociological theories about people in such neighborhoods. The strength of such a profile, however, should not be underestimated, because it may be rich in suggestion, in questions and angles of approach for further research.

Whatever kind of evidence you’re using, the emphasis rests on how you use what you have: how you articulate what it means and how carefully you link the evidence to your claims. When you find yourself asking, “How good is my argument?” here are two working criteria from the chapter:

Am I oversimplifying the implications of my evidence?

Does my use of evidence go beyond mere corroboration of an overly general claim?

Another guiding principle, perhaps the chapter’s most important point, is to think with the evidence; keep it before you. If you start to move too far afield, return to the source, the evidence itself, to refresh your thinking.

GUIDELINES FOR REASONING FROM EVIDENCE TO CLAIMS

Learn to recognize unsubstantiated assertions, rather than treating claims as self-evident truths. Whenever you make a claim, offer your readers the evidence that led you to it.

Make the evidence speak. Explain how it supports the claim; offer your reasons for believing the evidence means what you say it does.

Use evidence to advance your claim, not just confirm it. Explore how the evidence does not fit the claim, and use what you learn to reshape the claim, making it more accurate.

Consider what counts as evidence in a given field or context, or as one of the Voices puts it, remember that “evidence itself is dependent upon methodology— that it’s not just a question of gathering ‘information,’ but also a question of how it was gathered.”

Most professors agree that evidence is never completely neutral, simply a matter of “the facts,” so you need to determine the slant—the principles of selection— that have produced this evidence. And as a corollary, try to gather evidence from more than one side of a topic.

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Assignments: Reasoning from Evidence to Claims

Distinguishing Evidence from Claims. Take an excerpt from your own writing, at least two paragraphs in length—perhaps from a paper you have already written or a draft you are working on—and at the end of every sentence label the sentence as either evidence (E) or claim (C). For sentences that appear to offer both, determine