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If you cannot find a wide range of information or differing views about your question that
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align in some significant way with your own personal experience on the issue, consider
choosing a different topic. It is far better to switch topics at this point than to continue
forward with one that might not work well.

Step 2: Planning the Essay

Changing the World
This step of the workshop is designed to move you closer to the actual writing of the
essay. The following discussion will help you make sure that you have a clear point to
address, enough evidence to support it, and an organizational structure that will help
you prove your point.

Making a Claim
So far in this workshop, you have not been asked to write about your own position on
the question you have been exploring. This is intentional. Too often, writers go into a
topic already knowing their position, which can blind them to the complexity of the
issue. But now, after conducting research and thinking about your own personal
experiences with the topic, you can consider how you would present your position. You
cannot have a successful argument if you do not have a claim, which is what you are
hoping to prove, or convince your audience to believe. All strong arguments have a
claim that the reader can identify and debate.
In his piece “The Bully and the Pulpit,” Mckesson uses the metaphor of the bully on
his block to illustrate how to confront the destructive power of white supremacy:

The presence of the bully is difficult to overcome and the residue is difficult to shake.
I stress the importance of imagining our ideal world because we naturally gravitate
toward methods for achieving our desired outcomes. Indeed, we focus on
tactics — how do we beat the bully? — but we don’t always remember to prepare for
the day when the bully is no more. We will need a vision for that time too. If we don’t
have a vision for our desired future, how can we plan to achieve it? If you cannot
imagine it, you cannot fight for it. When we confront the bully, we are confronting our
fear and reclaiming our imagination. There are those who cannot imagine a block
without a bully. We must all imagine the block without a bully, otherwise we cannot
get there.

You can see in the underlined sentence that Mckesson claims we need to be able to
imagine a different future, one without the bully — white supremacy — if we are going to
move past our fears.
It’s important to remember that an argument’s claim must be debatable. Without a
debate, there is nothing to prove. So, when making a claim, be sure that it is something
with which some people might reasonably disagree. You should also avoid simply

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