Lesson 1.6 · Unit 1 · CED skill 4.A
Writing a paragraph that makes a claim and proves it
Now you write one. A body paragraph does three things in order: it makes a claim, it puts attributed evidence under that claim, and it explains the connection. Most student paragraphs manage the first two and stop, or stop one word later, at “this shows that,” which announces commentary without supplying any.
- CLE-1.A. Writers convey their positions through one or more claims that require a defense.
- CLE-1.B. Writers defend their claims with evidence and/or reasoning.
- Claim sentence: one arguable sentence, in your words, first.
- Attributed evidence: the shortest quotable unit, named: “Franklin writes that …”
- Fit the quotation: the sentence holding it must still read as a sentence.
- “This shows that” is a slot, not commentary: the commentary is whatever comes after it.
- End on reasoning: the last sentence of the paragraph should be yours, not the source's.
Source: Benjamin Franklin, “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” 1784.
Savages we call them, because their manners differ from ours, which we think the perfection of civility; they think the same of theirs. Perhaps, if we could examine the manners of different nations with impartiality, we should find no people so rude as to be without any rules of politeness; nor any so polite as not to have some remains of rudeness. The Indian men, when young, are hunters and warriors; when old, counsellors; for all their government is by counsel of the sages; there is no force, there are no prisons, no officers to compel obedience, or inflict punishment.
Rhetorical situation (SOAPS): Speaker, a printer and diplomat of seventy-eight, then the best-known American in Europe. Occasion, a short essay printed for European readers curious about the new republic. Audience, educated Europeans who took their own manners as the standard. Purpose: to unsettle the reader's category before describing anyone in it.
Exam tip: a paragraph that ends on a quotation has stopped a sentence early. The last line is where Row B commentary lives.
Franklin's first sentence is a claim, and its evidence is a pronoun. “Savages we call them” puts the reader inside the sentence as the one doing the calling, so the word under examination becomes a European habit rather than a description of anyone. The balanced clause that follows, “they think the same of theirs”, supplies proof by symmetry: a judgment running both ways measures distance, not rank. The claim is made and carried in two clauses, before a single example arrives.
Write one body paragraph about Franklin's account of government by counsel. Open with an arguable claim in your own words, quote no more than eight words with attribution, and close on commentary rather than on the quotation.
Show a model paragraph
Franklin makes the absence of coercion the proof of political maturity rather than the sign of its lack. Describing councils in which, he writes, “there is no force, there are no prisons,” he catalogs what a government is missing instead of what it holds, and the missing items are the machinery his European readers would have named as evidence of a real state. Removing them leaves persuasion as the only instrument of rule, which raises the standing of the people described. Franklin lets the reader supply the country that does need prisons.
Why it earns the point: an arguable claim in the writer's own words, a short attributed quotation, and commentary longer than the evidence it explains.