Name__________________________________

Date_________________________
Writing a paragraph with evidence to prove a claim
1) Write your claim, the statement/sentence that you are going to prove. This
will be the topic sentence of a paragraph.

Example: Students should not be suspended because it causes too much harm to
their education.

2) Introduce your source. If it is an article, web-page, or some short piece, put

it in quotation marks. If it is a book, movie, magazine title, or newspaper title, you
put it in italics. For example:

The article High suspension Rates at Charter Schools Dont Help Students by Luis
A. Huerta in The New York Times

Here are sentence starters to help you with introducing your source:

According to _____________________ in _________________.

(authors name)

Based on the article ______________________ by __________________, we can see

how
(title of article)

(authors name)

The evidence from _______________________ by ____________________ illustrates

that
(title of article)

(title of article)

(authors name)

_____________________ presents several facts in the article ___________________

about how
(authors name)

(title of article)

3) Present the evidence from the source. This can be a direct quote (needs
to be in quotation marks) or it can be a quote that you paraphrased (re-wrote in
your own words). But either way, you need to present the facts that the author
presented, because youre not the expert and you didnt do the research they
did.

Example with a direct quote: charter schools seldom enroll more students
once others drop out, means that the test scores of many charters only reflect the
achievement of the survivors

Example with a paraphrased quote: The students who get suspended most at
charter schools end up dropping out, and those students also have low test scores.
So then, the school looks like all their students have high test scores.

4) Analyze how or why this evidence proves your claim. Analyze means
explaining why or how about something, and in order to analyze you need to use
words and phrases like:

if ______ happens, then it will lead to ___________________, because _____________...

This fact proves my claim because _____________________...
Due to this evidence, the claim is accurate because ____________________...
Therefore, this shows how the claim is true because ____________________...
Consequently, we can see that ______________________ is true because...

And this might take more than one sentence. The best analysis usually requires
several sentences:

Example: Based on this fact, we can see that if you suspend a student, they are
more likely to drop out. This proves that suspensions cause too much harm to
students because students are missing school when they are suspended, so their
grades drop. And when their grades drop, it makes them feel bad about school
because school seems harder and more depressing. So students drop out more,
and it was all caused by suspending them. So if you suspend students, it leads to
them dropping out, therefore suspensions cause too much harm to students.

5) Put it all together:

With a direct quote:
Students should not be suspended because it causes too much harm to their education.
The article High suspension Rates at Charter Schools Dont Help Students by Luis A.
Huerta in The New York Times states that charter schools seldom enroll more students
once others drop out, means that the test scores of many charters only reflect the
achievement of the survivors. Based on this fact, we can see that if you suspend a
student, they are more likely to drop out. This proves that suspensions cause too much
harm to students because students are missing school when they are suspended, so their
grades drop. And when their grades drop, it makes them feel bad about school because
school seems harder and more depressing. So students drop out more, and it was all
caused by suspending them. So if you suspend students, it leads to them dropping out,
therefore suspensions cause too much harm to students.
With a paraphrased quote:
Students should not be suspended because it causes too much harm to their education.
The article High suspension Rates at Charter Schools Dont Help Students by Luis A.
Huerta in The New York Times states that The students who get suspended most at
charter schools end up dropping out, and those students also have low test scores. So
then, the school looks like all their students have high test scores. Based on this fact, we
can see that if you suspend a student, they are more likely to drop out. This proves that
suspensions cause too much harm to students because students are missing school when
they are suspended, so their grades drop. And when their grades drop, it makes them
feel bad about school because school seems harder and more depressing. So students
drop out more, and it was all caused by suspending them. So if you suspend students, it
leads to them dropping out, therefore suspensions cause too much harm to students.