Bold Claims—What They Are and Why We Want Them

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 Nathaniel 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.

More blog posts!

Looking for more AP Lit writing help? Check out these posts on the same topic!

Preparing For the AP English Literature Test

Discussing Complexity in AP Lit

Teaching Line of Reasoning to AP English Lit