English 105 terms

Claims and types of claims

Assertions the authors must justify and support with evidence and good reasons. Types:claim of fact, claim of value, claim of policy

Steps to identifying issues

draw on your personal experience, identify what is open to dispute, resist binary thinking, build on and extend the ideas of others, read to discover a writers frame, consider the constraints of the situation.

Synthesis

A discussion that forges a connections between the arguments of two or more authors.

Dangling/misplaced modifiers

A modifier that does not sensibly describe anything in its sentence.

Interpretations and inference

A writer will examine evidence, draw a conclusion based on reasoning and offer an explanation based on that conclusion

Thesis

An assertion that academic writers make at the beginning of what they write and then support with evidence throughout their essay.

Explain the three models for developing a thesis

Correcting Misinterpretations Model: used to correct writers whose arguments you believe have misconstrued one or more important aspects of an issue. Filing the Gap Model: points to what other writers may have overlooked or ignored in discussing a given issue. Modifying What Others Have Said Model: modifying another writers claim assuming there is mutual understanding.

Evidence

Evidence is the specific pieces of information that support a claim. Evidence can take that form of facts, quotations, examples, statistics, or personal experiences among others.

What is the difference between paraphrasing and summarizing

In your own writing you might paraphrase a few sentences, but you certainly not paraphrase a whole essay. In constructing your arguments, however, you will often have to summarize the main points of the lengthy texts with which you are in conversation.

Parallelism

Similarity of grammatical form between two or more coordinated elements

Context

The process of establishing a background for understanding an issue

Steps to evaluating support for a claim

recent, relevant, reliable, accurate