Reading Claims and Evidence

An example to help you nail this thing.

When you read, note the claims the rhetor is making and note the evidence used to prove the claim. A writer doesn’t always have to put the claims up front, or even her thesis (Purpose) for that matter. Sometimes the writer will state the evidence first, then put the purpose last as a moral to the story. Here’s an essay that Jay wrote for his monthly column in the magazine for Southwest Airlines:

The two former child actors took turns puckering their mouths and making little explosive sounds. I heard a splat, then another.

“What are they doing?” I asked Patti Ragan, the retirement community’s founder and director, who sat with my wife and me in a golf cart.

“Spitting,” she said.

“Why?”

She shrugged. “They’re teenagers.”

The splats got closer. Those two teens were bracketing their shots like artillery. Finally, Patti moved the golf cart out of range.

Although the two former actors didn’t show their appreciation, they were lucky to live in Patti’s community. Most retirees in their profession end up in unaccredited traveling zoos or in people’s homes. The Center for Great Apes in Wauchula, Florida, hosts chimpanzees and orangutans you’ve seen in the movies and on TV, from careerbuilder.com commercials to the soap opera Passions. 

Since the chimps in those ads happen to be several years old, filming them is like dressing up half a dozen toddlers and watching them trash an office—which would be pretty funny, actually. What’s not funny is that, while human toddlers would go back home, infant apes can’t. They get taken from their mothers at infancy, and Hollywood loses interest in them by the time they turn 6 because they stop looking so cute. A grown chimp weighs about 130 pounds. A grown orangutan could tear your arm off. And Patti Reagan loves them. 

You can learn a lot about the disturbing parallels between our species by watching a pair of teenaged chimps spit at you. But the Center isn’t so much about how human apes can be. It’s about how human we can be.

What’s Jay’s Purpose? To make you oppose the use of infant apes in entertainment, and support the Center for Great Apes. 

His Claims: Infant apes can’t be with their families, a grown chimp isn’t cute, and all apes are lovable. 

His evidence: a personal observation, the apes’ background, and the age apes lose their Hollywood careers. The evidence came before the purpose, which he told in the form of a moral: treating apes humanely makes us more human.

Contents