Single Point Essay

Select an Appropriate Audience

Choose a specific, well-defined audience that would share a commitment to your topic. Describe your audience in your preliminary analysis and discuss your plans to reach this particular audience. Your word choice, evidence selection, and writing style should reflect the audience’s background and interests.

Craft Your Claim

Well-structured claims: 1) feature a declarative sentence; 2) advance a controversial idea; 3) highlight only one idea; 4) express the idea precisely; and 5) target a specific audience. While you may choose any audience, your audience and the claim you advance should be sophisticated enough to warrant careful selection of evidence.

Support Your Claim with Compelling Evidence

Select and arrange your evidence with this audience in mind. Find at least ten reliable sources of evidence to support your claim. Weave your evidence together into strong coherent paragraphs that advance understanding of the subject. See Diana Hacker for advice on structuring strong paragraphs.