Select Evidence to Support Your Reasons

For each reason you offer to support your thesis statement, you’ll need evidence — such as details, facts, personal observations, and expert opinions — to back up your assertions and help your readers understand your ideas. The evidence you choose plays a central role in gaining your readers’ acceptance of your thesis statement.

You can draw evidence from your sources in the form of quotations, paraphrases, summaries, numerical data, and visual images. You can also gather evidence firsthand by conducting interviews, observations, and surveys, or by reflecting on your personal experience. Chapters 5 through 10 offer detailed suggestions for locating and choosing evidence for specific purposes.

Use the following prompts to identify evidence to support your reasons:

  1. List the reasons you are using to support your thesis statement.
  2. Identify relevant evidence from your sources, personal experience, or your own field research, and then list that evidence below each reason. You might need to review your sources to locate additional evidence, or even obtain additional sources.
  3. Determine whether you are relying too heavily on information from a single source, or on one type of evidence.

As you select supporting evidence, consider the genre of your document. Genre conventions often determine how and how much evidence is used in a document. Articles in magazines, newspapers, and Web sites, for example, are more likely to rely on interviews, observation, and illustrations as primary sources of evidence than are academic essays, whose writers tend to draw information from published sources found in a library or database. Multimodal essays, in contrast, are likely to use not only textual information and images but also audio, video, and animation.