CIE100: Common Intellectual Experience - Evidence Workshop: Claim, Evidence, Warrant (10 Points)

Assignment Goals

The goals of this assignment are:
  1. To select quotations that support arguments rather than decorate them
  2. To write the warrant — the reasoning that connects a quote to a claim
  3. To recognize and reject tempting-but-weak evidence
  4. To build essay paragraphs from complete argumentative chains

The Assignment

Purpose

Before drafting each essay, this workshop asks you to build the smallest complete unit of academic argument: the chain from claim to evidence to warrant. The warrant — your own reasoning showing why this quote supports this claim — is the step first-year writing most often skips, on the assumption that a good quote explains itself. It never does: the quote sits on the page and the reader waits to be told what it proves. The chain is adapted lightly from Toulmin’s model of argument (Toulmin, S., The Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, 1958). This is a standalone mini-assignment: it prepares evidence for the upcoming essay without changing anything about the essay assignment itself.

Task

Select two quotations you actually intend to use in the upcoming essay. For each one, write the full chain:

  1. Claim: one sentence of your own stating what you assert — a sub-claim of your working thesis, not the thesis itself.
  2. Evidence: the quotation, cited with page or line reference, trimmed to the words that do the work.
  3. Warrant: 2-3 sentences of your own reasoning showing why this quote supports this claim — what the quote’s specific words establish, and what has to be true for the evidence to carry the claim’s weight.

Then add one “tempting but weak” quote: a passage you considered using and rejected, with one sentence on why it fails — it is decorative (sounds good, proves nothing), out of context (means something else where it lives), or restates your claim rather than supporting it.

The whole response is roughly a 1-2 paragraph equivalent. Submit it through Canvas before the start of class.

Criteria

A strong response has warrants that would convince a skeptical reader who does not already agree with you, quotations trimmed to their load-bearing words, and a rejected quote whose failure you can name precisely. Two complete chains with real warrants beat four quotes with none.

Formats (UDL)

You may render your response as prose paragraphs (one per chain), as labeled lists (claim / evidence / warrant), or as annotated quotations (each quote followed by its labeled claim and warrant), as long as both chains and the rejected quote are present.

See also: Thesis Workshop (/Participation/ThesisWorkshop) and Counterargument and Concession (/Participation/Counterargument), this workshop’s pre-draft companions, and the quote-harvesting habits in How to Read Hard Texts in CIE (/Assignments/ReadingGuide), which is where good evidence is found in the first place.

Submission

Submit a word processed or PDF document through Canvas before the start of class.

Please refer to the Style Guide for code quality examples and guidelines.