As anyone who teaches AP Lit or Lang knows, forming a strong claim is the backbone to a high-scoring essay. My Lit students are strong writers, but I’ve noticed that several of them start their essays weakly. They seem hesitant to take too strong of a stance on the text and, ultimately, write an essay that lacks a backbone. Thus, my lesson on creating what I call a “bold claim.”
My students are still trying to get the hang of writing strong claims, so I tried something new in class this week. For homework, they had to read and annotate the 2018 prompt from Nathanel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance. I love this excerpt and read for it in Louisville that year.
What to do
My directions were simple: work in groups and create four claims. The categories included:
- No claim – No arguable statement is made (but one is attempted)
- Sufficient claim – A decent claim is made
- Bold claim – This claim is strong and lends itself to a line of reasoning
- Too bold of a claim – This relies on a misinterpretation or an argument that can’t be proved
My students spent about 10 minutes writing claims and their discussion was enlightening. They found the sufficient and too-bold claims easier to write than the no-claim or bold claims.
The results
When finished, here were their answers:
No claim
- Hawthorne uses diction
- Hawthorne uses imagery to enlighten the reader
- Zenobia lives a luxurious life.
Sufficient claim
- Hawthorne uses imagery and tone
- Hawthorne uses imagery and tone to show the narrator’s attitude towards Zenobia
- The narrator admires her wealth but not the person she has become
Bold claim
- The narrator has underlying regret on Zenobia’s behalf
- The narrator is very curious about Zenobia’s lifestyle but is also deeply unsettled by her change in personality
- The narrator is infatuated with the way she lives but is disappointed in the way her character has changed
Too bold of a claim
- Zenobia is deeply in love with the narrator
- The narrator and Zenobia are romantically involved
- The narrator is still in love with Zenobia after a divorce
What we learned
Once finished, we talked about the difference between a sufficient claim and a bold claim. As I expected, we all found the bold claims more complex and lending to a creating a line of reasoning, while sufficient claims only earned the thesis point. A sufficient claim could be followed by a line of reasoning, but not as eloquently or convincingly as the bold claims worked.
My takeaway
While it was a risk, the act of writing poor claims on purpose helped illuminate what makes a strong claim successful. I’ve been hammering home the importance of complexity since September, but it wasn’t clicking. This lesson helped students see that a complex or contrasting statement strengthens an entire argument in general.
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