Reading for Second Writing Assignment: Week of Monday, 23 June-Sunday, 29 June: Revising Claims

In my last post, I discussed the need to revise one's draft by noticing places where one makes a claim or offers an opinion, but one does not back what is said. In this post, I want to talk a little bit about how to revise claims.

Claims are opinions. They are statements you want your audience to believe. The quality of your claims goes a long way toward establishing your ethos with an audience. What do I mean by quality?

Claims come in two flavors, general and vague or specific and detailed. A vague claim is often a signal to a trained reader that the author has not taken the time to fully develop their thinking about their topic. Look at these three claims:

a. "Driving in Richmond sucks."
b. "Drivers in Richmond are less than polite."
c. "Drivers in Richmond think of themselves first and other drivers second. They drive aggressively and, in their haste to get where they are going quickly, they waste gas and make the driving more dangerous than it has to be."

Notice the truth of a claim has little to do with how precisely it states an author's thinking. All three of the claims above may be true, but what you are looking for is how developed and specific the claim is. Notice claim A is vague. There is a lot of information remaining in the author's mind, and his or her conception of poor driving may be vastly different than that of the audience. In a similar manner, claim B is more precise than claim A, but there is a lot of information hiding in the phrase, "less than polite." To be fully effective as a claim, it needs to be more specific. Now notice claim C is more specific and detailed than claims A or B. More important from a writers perspective, the audience of claim C has a more specific idea--a kind of road map--of how the writing which will follow will likely develop. This is the real test of a specific and useful claim, that is, can the audience tell what the author is thinking with some precision, and does the claim provide clues as to what topics the author will develop to back up their claim? If you can answer, "Yes," to both questions, chances are you've written a fairly good, useful, detailed, non-vague claim.

Now, why is this important? The short version? You are judged not only by how well you can back up what you claim but also by the quality of your claim. To return to the example of the engineer giving advice on which steel to use in constructing a bridge, there is a world of difference between saying, "We should us steel," and "We should use a steel with an index of flexibility X, a hardness of Y, and a carbon content of Z." If two different authors were to offer these claims, which one would have the greater ethos with you. Think about the question, because just as you judge the quality of the claims made by others, they are judging the quality of yours.

In the last post I discussed the fact that teachers and professionals value the quality of a writer/student's ability to think critically over almost everything else. One of the markers of quality thinking is how specific one's claims are. The upshot? Make specific, useful claims and develop your claims fully, and people are more likely to give you ethos. The ethos you gain will translate into higher grades and, more importantly, more money, more respect, and more people willing to listen to what you have to offer.

Steve