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Locating Additional Support

As you have seen throughout this workshop and in Mckesson’s essay, personal
experience can be a powerful and compelling source of evidence. However, an writing workshop
argument generally requires additional support to be persuasive. Sometimes readers
will too easily dismiss an argument that relies solely on personal experience, saying
something to the effect of, “Sure that might be true for you, but what about for other
people?” Mckesson recognizes that some of his readers might not find his personal
stories fully persuasive, so he adds evidence to make his personal experiences more
persuasive:

In many ways, we live in one of the bully’s golden ages, a time when the mere mention of
white supremacy is an anachronism. Absent the hoods and burning crosses, we presume
the bully dead. But he’s still operating in the shadows; he’s just working through insidious
means. The fact that many people refuse to acknowledge him means that we cannot
dismantle what he has wrought. And in our blindness we’ve created a host of studies to
explain away his legacy. In the meantime, he is at work. When we see 21 percent of kids of
color in poverty, that is white supremacy at work. When we see a president refusing to
allow immigrants from majority people-of-color countries into this country, that is white
supremacy at work. Defunding public education, gerrymandering, and scaling back the
Voting Rights Act are all manifestations of this ideology.

Notice that he provides several concrete examples that demonstrate white supremacy’s
lasting power, including education funding, poverty, and voting rights. The inclusion of
these examples helps Mckesson make his point about the need to imagine a world
without white supremacy. While the centerpiece of the argument that you are writing is
the personal experience you have had with this issue, you will, like Mckesson, need to
bolster your claim with additional types of evidence. In addition to personal experience,
the main types of evidence (p. 000) that appear in an argument are facts, scholarly
research, expert opinion, data, and statistics.

Locating Additional Support activity

Locate additional relevant and convincing evidence (conduct further research, if necessary).
Be sure to find various types of evidence (facts, scholarly research, expert opinion, and
data and statistics) that can appeal to both logos and pathos (p. 000). Then, identify the two
or three most relevant and credible pieces of evidence to support your claim.

Organizing the Essay

At some point in your education, you may have heard that an essay is supposed to have
five paragraphs: an introduction, three body paragraphs, and a conclusion. This
argumentative essay you are writing might, in fact, have five paragraphs, but it also
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