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subject. In contextualizing your argument, it may be helpful to think of how courtroom
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proceedings are portrayed in TV and movies. Before lawyers introduce evidence and
witnesses, they take a moment to lay out the facts of the case for the judge and jury.
Keep this analogy in mind as you write this part of your argument. It’s important to
stick to simple facts, illustrative examples, and unbiased explanations.
Argument
If you are having trouble crafting an introduction to your essay, you might ask yourself
these questions:

• Why is this topic important?
• What is my audience likely to know about this topic? What will it need to know to be
able to follow the argument I’m about to make?
• What are the consequences of the various issues this topic raises?
• Why should my audience care?

Supporting Your Thesis

Now that you’ve crafted a thesis statement and an introduction, let’s turn to the body
paragraphs of your argument essay. Each paragraph should contain three major
components:

1. A topic sentence that makes a claim stemming from your thesis statement.
It can be something you’ve stated directly in your thesis statement, it can be
something you’ve implied, or it can be a claim that follows logically from it.
2. Evidence that supports the central claim of the body paragraph. Effective evi-
dence is relevant, accurate, and sufficient.
3. Commentary that explains how the evidence you’ve chosen, and the claim that
evidence supports, contributes to the reasoning of your argument.

Here, we’ll walk through how to build a body paragraph step-by-step.

Writing Topic Sentences
The next step in writing an argument essay is to think about the claims that best sup-
port your position. If you are writing with a time limit, the body of your essay should
make at least two claims that support your position. If time allows, you can and should
make more claims if you think they are strong ones. Be sure you can back each claim
with solid evidence. You should probably save your strongest, most compelling claim
for last — make your first claim accessible and familiar to your audience. You’re more
likely to influence your audience using this strategy; the more a reader responds posi-
tively at first, the more likely it is that the reader will accept your argument as it unfolds.
If you are writing under time constraints, try making your claims into the topic sentences
you will use for each body paragraph of your essay. This will save time, and by writing your
claim in a complete sentence, you’ll have a better sense of the kind of evidence you’ll need,
and you will be able to see if the topic sentences create a line of reasoning leading back to
the thesis statement, such as the ones that follow. If they don’t, try changing the order of
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