Supporting Evidence in an Essay

Dear Student,

Have you ever asked yourself what the ultimate goal of education is? As a student, your ultimate goal is to discover the truth. This is why the aim of any essay you’ll ever write will involve making claims and then proving them to be true. In this email,
we briefly look at how you support your essay using evidence.

According to University of Leeds “academic writing must be supported by evidence such as data, facts, quotations, arguments, statistics, research, and theories.”

Let’s look at the specific process:

Make the Claim

When you write an essay, it’s essential to be clear about the claim that you’re making. All claims are based on something. They can be a product of your reading, observation, or a guess. Once you have made a claim, you have to provide the evidence to support it.

Support the Claim

In academic writing, you have three ways of supporting a claim:

Summary: Find the evidence and then summarise what it says in support of the claim you have made.

Paraphrase: Take the evidence and rewrite it in your own words but indicate whom the idea belongs to.

Direct quote: You copy-paste the exact words in the evidence you are using to support your claim and cite the owner of the words.

Always remember that evidence in an essay is used to support a claim that you’re making. It’s essential, therefore to show that you understand the evidence you are using.

For many students, summarizing and paraphrasing can be a considerable challenge. At Virtual English Teacher, we work with highly experienced editors. They can help ensure that the evidence you use to support your essay is well written and does not lead to plagiarism.

Want proof of our effectiveness and efficiency. Ask for a free, no-obligation sample of your text.
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