How to Write Better Essays

justify qualifying the claim in order to take account of the special cases

you’ve uncovered.

To return to our example, if the exceptions were just limited to one

or two individuals from privileged backgrounds, the author would have

to qualify the original claim.

2.2 General exceptions However, if you have found a general

category of exceptions, then you will have to move on to Steps 3

and 4.

Say you’ve discovered that most white-collar and computer crime is,

in fact, committed by criminals with university degrees. In this case the

objection cannot be dealt with so easily: you will have to ask the fol-

lowing questions.

Step 3: Is the claim too strong?

If you have found a general category of exceptions you must first ask

yourself, does this make the original claim too strong: more than the

evidence can support? If it does, then your author cannot maintain his

or her claim. They must either reign it in, qualifying it in general terms,

or abandon it altogether.

In our case the evidence can’t support the claim, so, if the author

wants to maintain it, she must qualify it by excluding all white-collar

and computer crime. However, this might weaken and restrict it so

much that it might be wiser to abandon it altogether, particularly when

it leads you to suspect that you could probably find other groups, too,

if you looked hard enough.

Step 4: Does it account for only part of the case?

Alternatively, if it can’t be qualified, and there is sufficient merit in the

argument to warrant not abandoning it, then the only thing you can

do is to extend the claim to cover the general category of cases that is

currently excluded. However, if this is possible, it is quite likely to lead

to conclusions your authors either didn’t see in the first place, or

wouldn’t agree with on the basis of their argument so far.

You might, for example, agree with the claim our author has

made, although you question the notion that it is the ‘socially’ deprived

that is the source of crime. You might argue that there are others

responsible for crime, who are deprived in different ways. They

may never have been socially deprived, but they may not have had a

stable father-figure in their lives: there may have been a family

breakdown, or they may have been moved from one boarding school

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