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!