A6-c: Understanding the kinds of evidence writers in a discipline use

A6-cUnderstand the kinds of evidence writers in a discipline use.

Regardless of the discipline in which you’re writing, you must support any claims you make with evidence—facts, statistics, examples, and expert opinion.

The kinds of evidence used in different disciplines commonly overlap. Students of geography, media studies, and political science, for example, might use census data to explore different topics. The evidence that one discipline values, however, might not be sufficient to support an interpretation or a conclusion in another field. You might use anecdotes or interviews in an anthropology paper, for example, but such evidence would be irrelevant in a biology lab report. The chart below lists the kinds of evidence accepted in various disciplines.

Evidence typically used in various disciplines

Humanities: literature, art, film, music, philosophy

  • Passages of text or lines of a poem
  • Details from an image or a work of art
  • Passages of a musical composition
  • Critical essays that analyze original works

Humanities: history

  • Primary sources such as photographs, letters, maps, and government documents
  • Scholarly books and articles that interpret evidence

Social sciences: psychology, sociology, political science, Anthropology

  • Data from original experiments
  • Results of field research such as interviews or surveys
  • Statistics from government agencies
  • Scholarly books and articles that interpret data from original experiments and from other researchers’ studies
  • Primary sources such as maps and government documents
  • Primary sources such as artefacts

Sciences: biology, chemistry, physics

  • Data from original experiments
  • Scholarly articles that report findings from experiments
  • Models, diagrams, or animations