Especially in your are working in the humanities (and some social sciences), the most common evidence you will offer to support your claims will be quoted terms, phrases, and passages from the discourses you are reading. Without such evidence, your claims are merely statements of opinion. You are entitled to your opinions, but you’re not entitled to having your readers agree with mere assertions. In fact, your readers generally will not highly value your opinions unless you provide some evidence to support them. When you provide evidence, you turn your opinions into arguments.
But before readers can value your claim as supported by evidence, they must first understand how your evidence counts as evidence for that claim. No flaw more afflicts the papers of less experienced writers than to make some sort of claim, or to offer a quotation from the text, and assume the reader understands how the quotation speaks to the claim. Here is an example:
Lincoln believed that the founders would have supported the North because as he said, this country was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
The writer may be correct that Lincoln believed that the founders would have supported the North, but what in that quotation would cause a reader to agree? In other words, how does the quotation count as evidence of the claim? The evidence says something about the views of the founders in 1776. How does that support a claim about what the founders would think in 1863? When pressed, the writer explained: “Since the founders dedicated the country to the proposition that all men are created equal and Lincoln freed the slaves because he thought they were created equal, then he must have though that he and the founders agreed, so they would have supported the North. It’s obvious.
Well, it’s not. After it has been explained, it may or may not be persuasive (after all, the author of “All men are created equal,” was himself a slave owner). But it isn’t obvious. Quotations rarely speak for themselves; most have to be unpacked, and whatever implicit pertinence they have to a claim made explicit. If you offer only quotes without interpreting them, your reader will likely have trouble understanding the quote as evidence in support of your point. Your paper will seem to be a pastiche of strung-together quotations, suggesting that your data never passed through the critical analysis of a working mind.
Whenever you support a claim with numbers, charts, visual images, and especially quotations—whatever counts as primary data in the context of a discipline—do not assume that what you see is what your readers will get. Spell out for them how it is that the data counts as evidence for your claim. For a quotation, a good principle is to use a few of its key words just before or after it. Something like this:
Lincoln believed that the founders would have supported the North because they would have supported his attempt to move the slaves to a more equal position. He echoes the founders’ own language when he says that the country was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Claims Anchored in Examples: Locating a Pattern of Evidence
In almost all academic writing, but especially in those disciplines that ask you to analyze and interpret texts, you can enhance your argument’s persuasiveness by offering your reader several pieces of textual evidence that form a recognizable pattern, that together build a case for a particular point you are making, that conceptually reinforce one another, or each complement the foundation upon which your argument rests. If, as a reader, you discover a single manifestation of a concept you are promoting in your essay, that’s interesting. If you locate two manifestations of a concept, that’s coincidental. But if you locate three (or more) manifestations of a concept, that’s convincing. That’s “a thing,” and you are just the person to reckon with it.
The several manifestations might all support a single concept you’re advocating. Or, the several manifestations might grow in complexity and resonance as you unveil them one by one. The third example might complicate your understanding of the first two, or might contrast powerfully with the previous examples. In this case an established pattern might be tested or troubled. Still, you are making generous and effective use of text under scrutiny by staging (revealing one by one) the bulk of your evidence, convincing because it seems complete.
Establishing Commonality
As you read and re-read a text, be on the look-out for repetitions of some sort. This might be a similarity in the way that something is described, or several instances of the writer (or a character) using the same concept to name and experience, or a series of remarks that point in a common direction. Often, these patterns are difficult to discern at first glance; identifying them comes with reviewing and re-reading. Recall the contrasting openers that writers use to stage their analysis: “On first glance,” “On closer inspection.” Readers appreciate being guided to what lies half-hidden, watching your arts of detection operate. Readers like being positioned as “insiders,” to special knowledge that you hold.
Many writers plan their essays by first coming up with an overarching idea, and then going back to the text to find textual evidence in its support. But you might try a “text first” approach that is seeded in passages, with the essay growing from those seeds. In this act of reverse engineering, you ask yourself: What will a reader need to know in order for these particular passages to become formative to my approach? What will I need to do in order to reveal that pattern they evince? What responsibilities do I have in identifying their parts, calling attention to their language, revealing what they imply?
You might be asking yourself: Which comes first—the specifics or the generalization, the evidence or the concept, the parts or the whole? Philosophers call this dilemma the hermeneutic circle, which suggests that we take note of phenomena (find them interesting or noteworthy) because they “speak to us,” even in an incipient way, as examples or illustrations of some concept or idea. But also, our concepts evolve, become complicated, or tested in some way, precisely because of the phenomena that gather our attention in the first place. Our minds particularize and generalize in a single operation. For us, there is no such thing as disinterested noticing, so accustomed are we to observe from a point of view. In academic writing, we agree to tease this dialectic operation apart, to support concepts with evidence, which involves sharing with readers our perspective, to help them to see as we see.
This happens by way of contextualizing. As it turns out, contextualizing evidence is perhaps the most important part of making an argument. Without exemplifying and illustrating your argument’s claim, the evidence remains inert and the thesis may seem impractical and without explanatory merit. So important is the cooperation of claim and evidence that some writers have learned to extract the textual evidence, place these examples on a single page, and then build the paper “around” them, reminding themselves of what will need to be established if the evidence is to seem truly foundational to the argument.
