RESEARCH CLAIM
ENGL 108 / SEC B1&B2/ SUMMER LEAP 2012 / OLDHAM & WACHTER-GRENE / HERNANDEZ & SCHAUMBERG
SHORT
PAPER
3.3
In academic writing you will be asked to argue a claim, the most important part of any
piece of critical writing. The claim defines the goals of your paper and tells your audience what you will
be talking about. It should be original, interesting, and complex—as we’ve discussed, good claims should
be arguable. Your claim also includes your stakes, which means that you express why what you are
arguing is important to the topic. Without a good claim, you can’t have a thoughtful, critical, persuasive
paper, which is what college writing is all about.
Before You Begin Writing
You’ve already done a lot of work towards being able to generate your claim. Remember, you won’t be
actually answering your question in an assignment, but this is practice for being able to begin writing
academic papers. You need to have a strong claim to produce strong papers. Think about the question
you came up with at the beginning of the week, and the smaller questions you had to ask to come up with
the larger one. Think about the sources that you found that deal with your topic, and the reasons you
thought those sources would help you add depth to your topic. You’ll want to keep all of these materials
in mind to have a good sense of how you would write a research paper about your topic. Then, you
should think about what you want to say about your topic, and give a reason why this argument is
important. Don’t be shy about using some of the work you’ve done to help you out here!
Goals and Outcomes
You want to present a claim about your topic, based on the research you’ve done and all the thinking and
writing you’ve completed this week. Be sure that your claim meets all the requirements for a good claim
that was discussed in class. Also be sure you have two parts to your claim:
1) the “what”: what you will be arguing
2) the “so what”: why what you are arguing is important
Because we are practicing writing a complex claim, you will need to explain your claim well. This means
you shouldn’t just have two sentences on your page. Instead, you might give some really brief
background to your topic, and then lead up to introducing your claim. Writing a claim and having it make
sense can take some work, so we’re expecting about a paragraph.
You’ll be turning in a revised version of this claim, along with the research question and annotated
bibliography, all together on Monday, July 30.
Guidelines and Due Dates
Format:
1 full paragraph, typed, double-spaced, 1” margins, title, proper heading, 12-point Times
Roman font, MLA format, proofread and edited
Due:
Thursday, July 26, before your orientation, turned in to Pam or Lisa or Donna
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