Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [113]
DISTINGUISHING EVIDENCE FROM CLAIMS
To check your drafts for unsubstantiated assertions, you first have to know how to recognize them. It is sometimes difficult to separate facts from judgments, data from interpretations of the data. Writers who aren’t practiced in this skill can believe that they are offering evidence when they are really offering only unsubstantiated claims. In your own reading and writing, pause once in a while to label the sentences of a paragraph as either evidence (E) or claims (C). What happens if we try to categorize the sentences of the following paragraph in this way?
The owners are ruining baseball in America. Although they claim they are losing money, they are really just being greedy. Some years ago, they even fired the commissioner, Fay Vincent, because he took the players’ side. Baseball is a sport, not a business, and it is a sad fact that it is being threatened by greedy businessmen.
The first and last sentences of the paragraph are claims. They draw conclusions about as yet unstated evidence that the writer will need to provide. The middle two sentences are harder to classify. If particular owners have said publicly that they are losing money, the existence of the owners’ statements is a fact. But the writer moves from evidence to unsubstantiated claims when he suggests that the owners are lying about their financial situation and are doing so because of their greed. Similarly, it is a fact that Commissioner Fay Vincent was fired, but it is only an assertion that he was fired “because he took the players’ side,” an unsubstantiated claim. Although many of us might be inclined to accept some version of this claim as true, we should not be asked to accept his opinion as self-evident truth. What is the evidence in support of the claim? What are the reasons for believing that the evidence means what he says it does?
The writer of the baseball paragraph, for example, offers as fact that the owners claim they are losing money. If he were to search harder, however, he would find that his statement of the owners’ claim is not entirely accurate. The owners have not unanimously claimed that they are losing money; they have acknowledged that the problem has to do with poorer “small-market” teams competing against richer “large-market” teams. This more complicated version of the facts might at first be discouraging to the writer, since it reveals his original thesis (“greed”) to be oversimplified. But then, as we have been saying, the function of evidence is not just to corroborate your claims; it should also help you to test and refine your ideas and to define your key terms more precisely.
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Try This 8.1: 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 it as either evidence (E) or claim (C). For sentences that appear to offer both, determine which parts of the sentence are evidence and which are claim, and then decide which one, E or C, predominates. What is the ratio of evidence to claim, especially in particularly effective or weak paragraphs? This is also an instructive way of working with other writers in small groups or pairs. It is often much easier to distinguish (E) from (C) in someone else’s writing first.
If none of your writing is immediately handy, try this exercise with a few paragraphs of Anna Whiston’s essay on talk shows included in Chapter 5, the section entitled “Using a Reading as a Lens: An Extended Example.”
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GIVING EVIDENCE A POINT: MAKING DETAILS SPEAK
Problem: Presenting a mass of evidence without explaining how it relates to the claims.
Solution: Make details speak. Explain how evidence confirms and qualifies the claim.
Your thinking emerges in the