Evaluating Your Supporting Paragraphs Study Guide (page 3)

Evaluating Your Supporting Paragraphs

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out. - SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784) ENGLISH LEXICOGRAPHER AND ESSAYIST

Even a strong introduction can't stand alone. In this lesson, you'll learn tips for evaluating the building block support you've provided to your thesis statement.

This lesson explains the next steps you need to take in evaluating and editing your first draft. Specifically, you'll review here the hard questions you need to ask yourself and the standards you need to apply to the supporting arguments you have supplied to prove your essay's thesis statement.

As you know, every essay is really some version of a problem/solution or a question/answer or a point of view/defense. All that really means is that 99% of the writing assignments you will have during your lifetime (including memos you may write once you're out in the working world, or teacher's reports you may write if you end up being a teacher) demand that you take a strong position on some subject and then persuade your reader to agree with you. That persuasion process is essential to the well-written essay. An examination and polishing revision of the supporting elements in your essay is the second step in the process of revising your rough draft.

Types Of Support For Your Thesis

In previous lessons, you reviewed many of the strategies that writers use to support the arguments of their essay. Now you're at the stage where you have to evaluate your own use of supporting material. To help you begin this process, note that, in general, writers evaluate their own work by asking themselves these questions:

• Have I argued in the most persuasive manner?
• Have I offered sufficient support for my position?
• Have I offered a variety of kinds of support?

There is no right way to support a thesis, and there is no precise number of pieces of evidence that you must supply to strengthen your argument. In most of the school assignments that you are given, it is probably wise to assume that a minimum of three supporting pieces of evidence or three related ideas will be sufficient to establish the strength of your argument. But more evidence is usually better, so if you have additional ideas to include, by all means do.

It is important to offer a variety of kinds of support. Your essay will be extremely boring and ultimately weaker if you offer only one kind of support. For review, here's a checklist of various kinds of support that writers often use.

• specific examples that illustrate the thesis
• verifiable facts that support the thesis
• expert opinions on the subject
• expert analyses on the subject
• personal anecdotes from you or others
• persuasive reasons for the reader to agree with the thesis
• acknowledgment of opposing views
• direct quotations from the text if you are writing a literary analysis or critique

Tip

Always include more than one (or two) of these support devices in every essay.

Is Your Support Relevant?

For truly effective writing, supporting material must be relevant. It is all too easy to stray from your subject and include information, arguments, or anecdotes that are merely distant cousins to your topic. Be extremely careful in evaluating your rough draft for this common error.

As an illustration, look at the rough outline below. (You saw a later version of this student's outline in Lesson 14.) Look carefully at this early draft of the outline and evaluate the supporting ideas it includes.

Does this outline suggest any supporting material that you suspect may be irrelevant or otherwise inappropriate? Look at these criticisms of the outline:

• Paragraph 3, which offers facts about the cost of uniforms, does not provide good support for the writer's thesis. In revision, she might correct this problem by comparing the high cost of uniforms to the often higher cost of regular clothes. Such an argument might support the use of uniforms.
• Paragraph 5 offers a quotation from a principal who rejected the use of uniforms. While it is often a good strategy to acknowledge the opposing argument, this is a tricky way to proceed. One way of making it work might be to discount, in some way, the quotation from this principal. Another might be to add a quotation, ideally a more convincing one, from a different principal, one who supports the use of uniforms.

Tip

Be careful when you do interviews. Your interviewees might not turn out to be the people you thought they'd be!

Checking Your Persuasive Strategies

After you've checked your rough draft once to be sure that all the information you've included is relevant, you must do another evaluation of the quality of the persuasive strategies (or tactics) that you've used.

In Lesson 20, you learned six types of support for your thesis. Review them here to make sure that you have used as many types of support as possible in order to strengthen your thesis:

Another very useful way to evaluate the effectiveness with which you've supported your thesis is to ask yourself a series of tough questions. Imagine you're a serious critic, or a demanding teacher, and apply these standards to your draft:

• Is each of the supporting paragraphs very specific and relevant?
• Does the essay establish authority with a strong voice and an appropriate tone?
• Does the essay acknowledge arguments against your thesis and counter them with good evidence?
• Have you supported your thesis with enough information? (Failure to do this is a very common error made by writers in a rush to finish the assignment.)
• Have you double-checked to make sure that you have included no language or generalizations that might offend your readers?

If you can answer yes to all of these questions, you've done a miraculously good job of writing your first draft. If you are forced to answer no to any of the questions, you're lucky to have guidance about the draft's weak spots. These questions point you to the areas where you need to strengthen your argument, either by expanding your supporting paragraphs or by adding new ones that enhance the persuasiveness of your argument.

It is extremely rare for even a professional writer to be entirely satisfied with a first rough draft. The checklists and questions provide a roadmap to follow in reworking your essay. The hardest part of revising a draft is attacking these big-picture issues. Once you're satisfied that your draft reflects your best efforts to assert, explain, and defend your thesis statement, you can go on to do the detail work of polishing paragraphs and individual sentences. The paragraph detail work of revising an essay will be the subject of the next lesson.