Lesson 1.5 · Unit 1 · CED skill 3.A
Evidence: the kinds, and the three tests that matter
Evidence is not proof. A quotation, a number, or a story becomes evidence only when it bears on the claim actually made, when there is enough of it, and when it is typical of what it stands in for. No reader is impressed that you cited something; they want to know why it settles anything.
- CLE-1.B. Writers defend their claims with evidence and/or reasoning.
- CLE-1.C. Types of evidence may include facts, anecdotes, analogies, statistics, examples, details, illustrations, expert opinions, personal observations, personal experiences, testimonies, or experiments.
- Kinds: fact, statistic, example, anecdote, expert testimony, analogy, historical precedent.
- Relevance: does it bear on the claim made, or on a nearby one?
- Sufficiency: is there enough of it to carry a claim this large?
- Representativeness: is the example typical, or chosen because it is not?
- Standing: evidence from a hostile source is hard to dismiss; name the source inside the sentence or it reads as assertion.
Description of: Ida B. Wells, “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” New York, 1892. Summarized, not quoted.
Wells's pamphlet gathers and extends the editorials that cost her the Memphis Free Speech. Rather than argue from her own testimony, she builds the case from material her opponents cannot disown: the accounts white Southern newspapers printed of the killings, and the accusations those same papers published alongside them. Setting the reports side by side, she shows how often the stated charge changed after the fact, and argues that a record kept by the accusers is the only one her readers will not wave away.
Rhetorical situation (SOAPS): Speaker, a Memphis editor and part-owner of the Free Speech, driven from the city in 1892 after an editorial on the killing of three Black grocers; the pamphlet appeared in New York with an introductory letter from Frederick Douglass. Audience, Northern readers who assumed what they read was true. Purpose: to make the record itself the witness, because her own word would be dismissed.
Exam tip: “uses evidence” is not analysis. Name the test the evidence has to pass, and the audience it has to pass it for.
Wells's central choice is about standing rather than outrage. Building from accounts printed by hostile papers means every fact arrives certified by people with no motive to help her, so a reader who wants the conclusion to be false must impeach his own sources first. The choice also fixes what she may claim: because those papers report accusations rather than findings, she argues about the accusations (how they shifted, how often one replaced another), and leaves the conclusion to a reader holding only the opposition's evidence.
Writers defend a claim with evidence, with reasoning, or with both. The College Board's list of kinds of evidence is longer than the one above: facts, anecdotes, analogies, statistics, examples, details, illustrations, expert opinions, personal observations, personal experiences, testimonies, and experiments. Wells leans on testimony and on the newspapers' own reports; a scientist's paper leans on experiments; a memoir leans on personal experience and observation. Name the kind of evidence a writer chose, then ask which of the three tests it has to pass.
Write one paragraph making a claim about Wells's decision to argue from her opponents' own published accounts. Name which of the three tests the choice is meant to pass, and say what it costs her.
Show a model paragraph
Wells's use of the white press is a bid for sufficiency she could not otherwise make. One case, however well documented, invites the reply that it was exceptional; a pattern assembled from the accusers' own columns cannot be called exceptional without discrediting the columns. The choice costs her range. Working only from what those papers chose to print leaves the record shaped by their omissions, so her argument runs on their terms.
Why it scores: one choice, tested against a standard the exam itself names, with commentary on what the choice buys and what it costs.