1. C ONNECTING E VIDENCE TO A C LAIM : A M INI -U NIT ON A RGUMENTATION Jean Wolph June 2014

2. Illustrating | Use specific examples from the text to support the claim Authorizing | Refer to an “expert” to support the claim Extending | Put your own “spin” on terms and ideas you take from other texts Countering | “Push back” against the text in some way (e.g., disagree with it, challenge something it says, or interpret it differently) In this mini-unit, we’ll practice ways that writers use sources to develop their arguments:

3. Text Set for this Mini-Unit: “First Lady Proposes Ban on Junk Food Marketing in Schools” by Maggie Fox, NBC News Excerpt from Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food by Eric Schlosser & Charles Wilson “Healthy Fast Food: Tips for Making Healthier Fast Food Choices” America's Top 10 Healthiest Fast Food Restaurants (http://www.health.com/health/article/0,,20411588, 00.html)

4. Read & annotate the text set. Draft a claim related to this issue that you would like to defend. Identify quotations, facts, and statistics in these articles that will help you support that claim. What You’ll Do:

5. Now that you’ve identified most of the evidence you’ll use… it’s time to make the evidence WORK for you.

6. One problem writers sometimes have is using evidence effectively. Today we’ll focus on connecting our evidence to the claim.

7. Let’s try an example on a different topic: Claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts.

8. Evidence collected so far: Statistics and facts about recycling and about the school’s practices Joseph Harris calls this FORWARDING. In this mini- unit, we’ll look especially at ILLUSTRATING and EXTENDING.

9. Illustrating: Use specific examples from the text to support the claim Extending: Put your own “spin” on terms and ideas you take from other texts What will we do when we are… ???

10. Source: WasteFreeLunches.org Evidence from research (This is the evidence that we will use or forward, to advance our argument.) Claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts. “Lunch foods cause a big trash problem. In fact, on average a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year. That equals 18,760 pounds of lunch waste for just one average- size elementary school.” A waste-free lunch could save $246.60 per school year per person. How could we connect this piece of evidence to our purpose, to convince readers that we should increase our recycling efforts? These pieces of evidence will be used or forwarded to ILLUSTRATE why our claim is a good one.

11. Source: WasteFreeLunches.org Evidence from research (What we will forward, to advance our argument.) Connection to claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts. (This is where we’ll extend the evidence, putting our own spin on it.) “Lunch foods cause a big trash problem. In fact, on average a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year. That equals 18,760 pounds of lunch waste for just one average- size elementary school.” A waste-free lunch could save $246.60 per school year per person. Students at our school often bring disposable containers in their sack lunches. Encouraging everyone to use washable containers instead would reduce the amount we throw away each day. Harris calls this extending because we’re moving beyond the information we’ve cited.

12. Source: T. Pragya, “Recycling Facts for Kids” Evidence from research (what we will forward to advance our argument.) Claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts. (how we’ll extend the evidence, putting our own spin on it.) Families throw away 6 trees of paper in a year. How could we connect the evidence to our purpose, to convince readers that we should increase our recycling efforts ? Illustrating

13. Source: T. Pragya, “Recycling Facts for Kids” Evidence from research (what we will forward) Connection to claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts. (how we’ll extend the evidence) Families throw away 6 trees of paper in a year. Some of the paper we use at school is sent home in the form of notes and newsletters. We could reduce the number of notes home by posting most notices on our website instead. Extending Illustrating

14. Source: T. Pragya, “Recycling Facts for Kids” Evidence from research (what we will forward) Claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts. (how we’ll extend the evidence) We use 4 million plastic bottles an hour. The average person uses 107 bottles and 160 cans a year. “Reusing saves landfill space. We are running out of places to bury our trash.” How could we connect the evidence to our purpose, to convince readers that we should increase our recycling efforts? Illustrating

15. Source: T. Pragya, “Recycling Facts for Kids” Evidence from research Connection to claim: Our school should increase its recycling efforts. We use 4 million plastic bottles an hour. The average person uses 107 bottles and 160 cans a year. “Reusing saves landfill space. We are running out of places to bury our trash.” Preparing cafeteria lunches for students means a large number of bottles and cans are emptied each day. We could reduce the amount of trash sent to the landfill if we recycled them instead. Illustrating Extending

16. How can we explain the process we just used? How will we apply it to our own research and writing in order to make a stronger connection between our evidence and our claim?

17. Organize the key facts and stats you plan to useOrganize the key facts and stats you plan to use Column 1 Explain how/why those facts are relevant to your claimExplain how/why those facts are relevant to your claim Column 2 Next Steps: Return to our text set on Fast Food. Use the Chart to

18. Source: Evidence from research Claim: Connection to Claim: Illustrating Extending

19. FEEDBACK How well did we connect our evidence to our claims? How well did we use the facts for our own purposes (support our claim)?

20. Use your chart to flesh out a flashdraft of the argument.

21. S OMETIMES WE DISCOVER WE NEED MORE INFORMATION IN ORDER TO EFFECTIVELY CONNECT THE EVIDENCE TO OUR CLAIM. P ERSONALIZING THE DATA CAN HELP.

22. Digging Deeper / Honing our Skills How might we personalize our evidence in order to make an even stronger connection to our claim?

23. Evidence: “Lunch foods cause a big trash problem. In fact, on average a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year.” Example: How could I find out how many of our students and teachers bring disposable lunches? I could make a count and then calculate an average. Or I could conduct a survey to see how often students bring their lunches. I could also ask if anyone already uses only washable containers. Illustrating Extending

24. Source: http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste.http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste Evidence: “Lunch foods cause a big trash problem. In fact, on average a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year.” Connection: Our survey shows 39% of our students bring their lunches from home most days. 67 pounds of waste x 233 students = 6088 pounds. 6000 lbs. = 3 tons. Our own survey helps us improve our connection to the claim: Extending

25. Source: http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste.http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste Evidence: “Lunch foods cause a big trash problem. In fact, on average a school-age child using a disposable lunch generates 67 pounds of waste per school year.” Connection: A school-wide survey showed that 39% of our students bring their lunches from home on a regular basis. At 67 pounds of waste per student, we could be keeping about 3 tons of refuse out of the landfill, just by putting our food in washable containers instead of buying food in disposable packs. Next, let’s draft what we could say about this personalized evidence. Extending

26. Evidence: “Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees.” Initial Connection: Middle school students and teachers use a lot of paper each day. Much of this ends up in the trash. Attention to recycling could reduce the number of trees that are sacrificed. Another Example: Hmm…I don’t know how much paper our students and teachers throw away. I could conduct a waste audit so that this statistic would have more meaning. Or I could look for statistics that estimate how much students waste. Extending Illustrating Extending

27. Source: http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste.http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste Evidence: “The average secondary school produces 22kg of [paper] waste per pupil each academic year.” Connection: We have 223 students. 22 kg per student x 233 = 5,126 kg of wasted paper Can we visualize metric measurements? If not, let’s convert: 48 lbs. per student or 11,300 pounds …..(nearly 6 tons!). Another statistic (our school’s size) helps us improve our connection to the claim: Extending

28. “Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees.” We can now take our original piece of evidence further: Wow! If our school produces nearly 6 tons of paper trash each year, we could be saving 102 trees annually!!!! Extending

29. Source: http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste.http://www.recyclenow.com/recycle/recycle-school/get-your-recycling- collected/how-much-does-your-school-waste Evidence: “The average secondary school produces 22kg of [paper] waste per pupil each academic year.” Connection: While a waste audit would help us know exactly how much our school is throwing away, we can use the average of 22 kg per student to estimate that our school sends 5,126 kg of paper to the landfill each year. That’s 48 lbs. per student or 11,300 pounds (nearly 6 tons!) from our school of 233 students. We could save over 100 trees each year just by recycling. Putting the connection into words is the next step: EXtending

30. Return to the key facts and stats you plan to use.Return to the key facts and stats you plan to use. Column 1 Review your explanations of how/why those facts are relevant to your claim.Review your explanations of how/why those facts are relevant to your claim. Column 2 Personalize! Plan additional data- gathering as needed to closely connect the evidence to the claim.Personalize! Plan additional data- gathering as needed to closely connect the evidence to the claim. Column 3 Next Steps: Extending! Then revise your original flashdraft to include the new, personalized evidence.

31. Source: Evidence from research Claim: Connection to Claim: MY KEY FACTS How I’ve made these key facts relevant to my claim Illustrating Extending Post-it© with notes on the research I need to do in order to further personalize these facts.

32. How can we explain the process we just used? How will we apply it to our own research and argument writing in order to make a stronger connection between our evidence and our claim?

33. H OW COULD WE USE AUTHORIZING TO ENHANCE OUR ARGUMENT ? Digging Deeper!

34. What will we do when we are… ??? Authorizing: Refer to an “expert” to support the claim

35. Authorizing is another move in argument writing. First, we select a compelling piece of evidence. Then we identify the source of the evidence. Finally, we show the importance of that source, if it is not obvious.

36. How are these writers using AUTHORIZING? “James Thompson, Jr. is president of Chartwell Information, Inc., one of the first companies in the country to actually collect and publish empirical data about waste disposal and projected needs. In 1991, his company discovered that, rather than running out of landfill space, the United States had enough working landfills for over 18 years at projected capacity, more than enough to handle expected waste.”—”What Can We Expect for Future Landfill Fees and Space?” by Barbara Hudson, Chartwell Information Services. Retrieved 7-26-14 from http://www.worldsweeper.com/Disposal/v6n2l andfills.html. According to the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment (2008), increased regulation has eliminated many potential sites for landfills, straining our ability to dispose of waste.

37. How might this writer change this passage to use AUTHORIZING? “A significant 74% drop in air pollution is observed if paper is made from recycled material as opposed to new wood pulp, indicating that recycling paper is environmentally friendly. “ —by Nick J., http://www.buzzle.com/articles/positive-and-negative- effects-of-recycling.html, last updated 2012 http://www.buzzle.com/articles/positive-and-negative- effects-of-recycling.html

38. Try it: Review your text set on Fast Food. Select 2-3 pieces of compelling evidence in which the source is clearly identified. Think: Is the source reputable? In what ways is this person or agency an “expert”?

39. List 2-3 pieces of evidence that have a reputable, identified source.List 2-3 pieces of evidence that have a reputable, identified source. Column 1 Practice how you will point to that identification as you introduce the evidence.Practice how you will point to that identification as you introduce the evidence. Column 2 Note where in your draft you will insert this information.Note where in your draft you will insert this information. Column 3 Draft Next Steps: Draft Then revise your original flashdraft to include this new text in which you use authorizing to enhance your argument.

40. How can we explain the process we just used? How will we apply it to our own research and argument writing in order to make a stronger connection between our evidence and our claim?

41. C OULD WE COUNTER SOME OF THE EVIDENCE THAT O PPONENTS OF RECYCLING MIGHT OFFER ? Digging Deeper!

42. What will we do when we are… ??? Countering: “Push back” against the text in some way (e.g., disagree with it, challenge something it says, or interpret it differently)

43. Countering is another move in argument writing. First, we acknowledge a claim that is in opposition to ours. Example: Others will argue that our school should NOT increase its recycling efforts.

44. Countering Then, we identify evidence that our opponents might use to support their claim. Example: Those who are against more recycling quote statistics that indicate there is no landfill shortage. They claim that “[i]f all the solid waste for the next thousand years were put into a single space, it would take up 44 miles of landfill, a mere.01% of the U.S. landspace.”—Cordato (1998)

45. Countering Finally, we suggest a different way of thinking about their evidence: Example: This statistic is extremely outdated, however. A quarter of a century ago, it was the best prediction of future landfill needs. More recent analyses, however, note the problem of increased regulation. These regulations have eliminated many potential sites for landfills, according to the Manhattan Institute, Center for Energy Policy and the Environment (2008). We’re also AUTHORIZING here, as we draw on information from a recognized authority, The Manhattan Institute.

46. What concerns might a reader raise about these sources? “James Thompson, Jr. is president of Chartwell Information, Inc., one of the first companies in the country to actually collect and publish empirical data about waste disposal and projected needs. In 1991, his company discovered that, rather than running out of landfill space, the United States had enough working landfills for over 18 years at projected capacity, more than enough to handle expected waste.”—from ”What Can We Expect for Future Landfill Fees and Space?” by Barbara Hudson, Chartwell Information Services. Retrieved 7-26- 14 at http://www.worldsweeper.com/Disposal/v6n2la ndfills.html. http://www.worldsweeper.com/Disposal/v6n2la ndfills.html According to the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Energy Policy and the Environment (2008), increased regulation has eliminated many potential sites for landfills, straining our ability to dispose of waste. Turn and Talk

47. Acknowledge the other side’s claim: Note the evidence they are using that we want to refute: Suggest a different way of thinking about their evidence: Choose one passage. With a partner, draft sentences about landfill capacity that Be ready to share what you came up with!

48. Read these conflicting pieces of evidence. Theirs: “In the paper industry, 87% of the trees used are planted to produce paper. For every 13 trees ‘saved’ by recycling, 87 will never get planted….The lesson is this: if your goal is to maximize the number of trees, don't recycle.” -- Roy E. Cordato, professor of Economics, Campbell University, “Don’t Recycle: Throw it Away” (MISE Monthly, 1998, V3, No. 12) Ours: “Recycling a ton of paper saves 17 trees.” –T. Praga, “Recycling Facts for Kids”

49. Now Try-it: Countering Acknowledge the other side’s claim. Note the evidence they are using that you want to refute. Suggest a different way of thinking about their evidence. Debriefing: We’ll share our efforts and talk about what worked and what might improve our attempts to counter.

50. Name a claim that the “other side” is making.Name a claim that the “other side” is making. Column 1 Identify a piece of evidence or reason they might use to support their claim.Identify a piece of evidence or reason they might use to support their claim. Column 2 Help us think differently about that evidence.Help us think differently about that evidence. Column 3 Return your draft Next Steps: Return your draft Then revise your original flashdraft to include this new text in which you counter their argument.

51. How can we explain the process we just used? How will we apply it to our own research in order to make a stronger connection between our evidence and our claim?

52. Q UESTIONS ?