TOULMIN MODEL OF WRITING

What are the basic components of a good expository paragraph? 1.CLAIM 1.EVIDENCE 1.WARRANT

What does each step mean? 1) CLAIM: Your topic sentence: what will your paragraph be about? This should not be a fact that is already in the text, it should be your IDEA. 2) EVIDENCE: What examples will you use to prove your point? Always give a context to your example. 3) WARRANT: How does your evidence prove your idea in your claim?

Samples We believe Margaret killed her husband when she got back home. If Charles had fallen down the steps, he would have been able to grab onto to something. By examining the crime scene, we found out that Charles was holding a cup in his hand. We can also conclude that the woman struck him in the back of the head, which made him search for something to hold on to.

Sample 2 According to Margaret’s story and witness accounts we have concluded that Charles’ death was an accident. At the time of death, “the police concluded that Charles died from a wound on the head and confirmed the fact that he had been drunk”. With this information we concluded that Charles fell from the stairs while intoxicated. His fall resulted in the fatal injury thus concluding that Charles’ death was an accident.

Sample 3 Based upon the evidence, Margaret killed her husband Charles. Through examining the crime scene, we found that there was a glass in Charles’ hand after he had fallen down the stairs. If the glass was in Charles’ hand when he fell, it would have slipped out of his hand and shattered. Also, the positioning of the cup looks as though it had been placed. Also, if he had fallen, there would have been more than a single wound on his head.

Sample 4 Evidence shows that Margaret could not have killed her husband. In the background, there is food cooking. The food signifies that she was downstairs cooking food while her husband fell from upstairs. The fact that the food is steaming has to mean that it had just been made. This concludes that Margaret could not have killed her husband Charles because the evidence proves they were both in different parts of the house when the incident occured.

Sample 5 Using clues displayed both in the text and image, it can be assumed that Margaret had killed her husband out of rage. Without a proper weapon displayed in the scene, Charles’ death was caused by the head trauma from his fall down the stairs. Naturally, if it is instinct for a human being, especially from disorientation caused by alcohol, to use both hands to save oneself during a fall. Charles could not have kept holding a glass if he had fallen. The glass should have also been broken.

When remembering an event, the way one feels or remembers a feeling can affect the whole way one remembers it. In “Making Poison” the author says, “I can’t remember what we did with the poison” (Atwood 1). She also says, “I remember the glee in which we stirred and added, the sense of magic and accomplishment, making poison is as much fun as making a cake” (Atwood 1). The children are tryng to explain their experience with creating the poison. They can’t finish the story, though, because they don’t remember what they ended up doing with the poison. However, the one thing they do remember, is the joy of creating

the poison so they are telling this story with no ending because their main focus was placed on the fact that they enjoyed making it. The author describes the fun that they had in making the poison amounted to about the same as making cake. This shows that creating something that she as a child thought to be destructive was easy and not complicated to do. She explains it as if it was nothing, just normal and it can affect the whole memory because what she was trying to get across wasn’t the fact that she thought she was creating something for harm, but rather, she created it for fun. In her mind,

the thought of creating poison wasn’t a bad thing, but a rewarding. For these examples, emotional truth was misleading to the memory because of the joy they felt. This means that they can’t remember everything about their experiences because their emotions overpowered the entire memory.