How to Write Better Essays

Clearly, then, you must make every effort to match the strength of

your statements to the strength of your evidence, using words like

‘much’, ‘many’, ‘some’, ‘frequently’. In this way you avoid the risk of

overstatement, which will weaken your arguments and lead the exam-

iner to dismiss them for lack of sufficient evidence.

You can do this in three ways in descending order of evidential

strength.

6.1 Hard evidence

This is the strongest form of evidence, which includes statistics, exam-

ples, quotations, even anecdotes. Obviously, wherever possible use this

form of evidence to support your arguments. Although readers can

challenge your judgements and the interpretation you place on this evi-

dence, they cannot criticise you for dispensing mere opinion. The hard

evidence you use shows that there are serious grounds for someone

to consider the arguments and points you’ve developed.

6.2 Explication

However, often it’s simply not possible to support an argument with

the sort of hard evidence it needs. Nevertheless, you may still believe

it’s a valuable argument to develop, one that most people will accept

for good reasons. It may not even be possible to gather any evidence

of any kind to support it: it’s just that most of us accept that it’s

reasonable to believe that this is the case. Of course, common opinion

is not always common-sense, but in these cases it is more a question

of what makes reasonablesense.

For example, you might claim that most people believe that tobacco

companies should not target their products at children. Now there may

be no hard evidence for this claim: there may have been no surveys

ever done, or government statistics issued about what people believe.

Yet it’s obvious you’re probably right. All you can do, therefore, is to

reveal the reasonableness of this claim through careful explication

of your argument. In this way you show that your assumptions are

reasonable, that they’re based on common-sense, and there are no

flaws in your arguments.

In our claim about tobacco companies, for example, we might argue

that most people are aware of the long-term health problems that

smoking creates; that children are not in a position to evaluate all the

information and make a free and informed choice; and that once

hooked at an early age most smokers find it difficult to quit and, there-

fore, end up suffering from these health problems, some of which may

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