1. Don’t assume agreement—always support claims with evidence
Claim + Support
Don’t assume agreement—always support claims with evidence

2. The Skeleton of a Paper
Your job as a writer is to make your case AND consider your readers along the way:
Intro to frame the issue
A clear thesis (position)
New paragraph for each main point
Enough detail for readers to understand what you mean
Conclusion to tie up loose ends

3. Claim + Support
Writing works on a claim + support system. Every time you write something, you have to be prepared to support the claim. For example,
Airport screeners should use racial profiling because doing so will increase the odds of stopping terrorists.
What is racial profiling?
You need to define the term and write about its uses. Is it common?
How will it stop terrorists?
You need to explain what airport screeners do when they profile and then explain why it will actually stop terrorists
What do terrorists look like?
You have to anticipate that people will ask this question and explain how a profile can be effective even though terrorists might look different

4. Supporting Claims w/ Evidence
Here are some methods to make sure your ideas are well-developed:
Use examples and illustrations
Cite data (facts, statistics, evidence, details, and others)
Examine testimony (what other people say such as quotes and paraphrases)
Use an anecdote or story
Define terms in the paragraph
Compare and contrast
Evaluate causes and reasons
Examine effects and consequences
Analyze the topic
Describe the topic
Offer a chronology of an event (time segments)
After you have offered a piece of evidence to support your point and develop your idea, you need to comment on the information to create meaning. Commenting on supporting information is the glue that holds a paper together:
The equation: Your claim + supporting info + comment

5. Use Your Readers’ Knowledge
Most of the words in a good essay will be devoted to answering the question "How do you know?" When writing your essay, take that question very literally. If you do in fact believe that a claim you are making in your essay is true, let your readers know what you saw, read, or heard that convinced you it was true. In many cases, of course, you may not be able to answer that question without doing further research, because you may not remember how you learned something. That means that you will have to, in effect, learn it again for your essay Note that the standard here is that you should support every claim that readers might doubt. Don't fall into the trap of assuming that everyone knows what you do. If a reasonable person could question your claim, you should tell us how you know it's true. Even readers who tend to agree with you already or know most of what you're saying will find that your essay more strongly reinforces their existing beliefs if you support your claims with good evidence

6. Supportable Claims = Evidence
So, you know you need to have a series of major claims that you need to build around. Now, be sure that they are actually supportable with one or more of the methods listed on the previous slide. For example, you might state that a voter ID law is not necessary in the United States. From there, you would have to provide supporting information about (a) what you mean by a voter ID law and (b) why it is not necessary. You could find evidence in the form of a current law to support (a) and historical precedent of a low number of voter fraud cases to support (b). However, if you wrote, “State legislatures have no right to pass a voter ID law”, that’s an unsupportable claim. State legislatures do have a Constitutional right to set law. There literally is no way to support this claim and have it be factually correct.

7. Supportable Claims = Specific
Likewise, if you wrote, “State Legislatures are wrong to pass voter ID laws”, you’d have a different problem. How do we quantify “wrong”? That’s an ethical distinction that assumes a shared set of values. If you want to write about values and question peoples’ ethics, that’s fine, but you aren’t going to be able to support the claim that you’re “right” and they are “wrong.”
Try to avoid:
right/wrong distinctions—so much of life’s choices are context dependent. The right/wrong distinction drastically oversimplifies issues. Re-word the statement and you’ll likely find the real reason that you need to support 
good/bad distinctions—good/bad implies an ethical view of the issue. If you wrote, sugar is “bad.” That wouldn’t be true. The body needs various forms of sugar to survive. Sugar isn’t “good” or “bad” in isolation. Think about the issue more to find the real issue here.
overgeneralizations—it’s best to qualify claims. If you write, “everyone knows that life starts at conception” you will be hard pressed to support that. How can you quantify “everyone”? You can’t. Qualify the claim, “A majority of Americans used to believe that life begins at conception.” You can support that with polls or quotations from authorities on the issue.