The claim is the assertion that the argument is attempting to make. An essay can include several levels of claims. For example, the overarching claim is the thesis statement. However, an essay may include several smaller claims that all lead up to the main claim, or thesis. For a five-paragraph essay, a student’s work would likely contain three main claims, one for each of the body paragraphs. This is a good place to start but also is not the only way to go. Depending on the length and depth of a paper, argument writing can have just a few or many claims. Based on Toulmin’s reasoning, a claim should be written out in essentially this way: “My claim is true, to a qualified degree, because of the following reasons, which make sense if you consider the warrant, backed by these additional reasons” (Lunsford et al., 2013, p. 132). Each part of the argument builds together to support the claim.
Activity #1: A Good Ruler Focus: Claims Source: George Hillocks, Teaching Argument Writing
Teachers can give their students a photograph of an individual of a certain profession, and have them both define what makes a good candidate for the profession as well as evaluate whether they think the person in the photograph qualifies as one. One example of this is an old portrait of a European ruler, displayed in lavish and extravagant wealth. Students would discuss in small groups the characteristics that make a good ruler, which becomes the warrant. They then make observations, or gather data, about the prince in the photograph.
Based on what they know about the prince as well as about what it takes to be a good ruler, they can make a claim about whether or not this particular prince would make a good ruler. Generally, the students will say no, since the rulers of old are often overweight and pompous, which contradicts the values of our society today, which sees a hero and leader as someone who is the first onto the battlefield. In a similar way to the activity where a teacher gives students a prompt and asks them to find quotes before forming a claim, teachers can adapt this concept to help students develop thesis statements as well. Teachers can give students passages or quotes from a text, but this time without a prompt. Students will make observations, create judgements and form conclusions about a text. These conclusions can then be written as thesis statements which express what the students believe that the text’s main message is. Again, the focus is still on analyzing the evidence and the general topic being the last thing to form based on the judgements to back it up.