A ________ is a belief, argument, assertion or declaration about a certain topic.

A ______ refers to the _________ of your essay. In academic writing an argument refers to the _____ given with the goal to persuade or convince other people that an idea is right or wrong.

4 characteristic of a claim

A _________ is a statement that reports, describes, predicts, and makes causal claims on whether something is a settled fact.

Claims of fact are supported by ________ like statistics, instances or examples, and expert testimonies.

________ is something that is known and proven to be true. It is an undisputed truth confirmed by our senses like:

The sun is warm.

 Dead fish smells bad.

It could also be a truth confirmed by experts or scholars:

Confirmed truth: 

The earth is an oblate spheroid.

 Water boils at 100 degrees Celsius.

_________ make a judgment--they express approval or disapproval, attempting to prove that some action, belief or condition is right or wrong, good or bad, beautiful or ugly, worthwhile or undesirable. Many claims of value simply express tastes, likes and dislikes, or preferences which are not the proper subject of an argumentative essay. "Milk tastes good" is a value claim, but it would be a waste of time to write a persuasive essay on the subject.

The two most fertile areas for value claims in argumentative writing--and the two areas in which people most often disagree--are

_______ the study of beauty and the fine arts, attempts to gauge the value of works of art--books, paintings, sculpture, architecture, dance, drama, and movies, to name a few. For experts and laypeople alike, difference of opinion over the aesthetic value of works of art usually exists because they disagree on the standards by which such value is determined. Even if they agree on a set of standards, they may disagree about how successfully the art object under discussion has met these standards.

____________ express judgments about the rightness or wrongness of conduct or belief. Here, too, disagreements abound. As with aesthetics, claims about morality often depend upon certain standards or principles held by the arguer.

______________ argue that certain conditions should exist. It also states that actions should be carried out. Basically, it is perceived as a relatively direct statement. As the name suggests, they advocate adoption of policies or courses of action because problems have arisen that call for solution. The words should or ought to or must are almost always expressed or implied in the claim.

This claim can also be called claim of solution because it suggests and supports policies and solutions, and the action to be taken is based on the results. You will know if a statement is a ________ if there is an action to be done or a solution to be taken.

often require you to build upon fact and value claims. You may need to establish with a claim of fact that there is a problem needing a solution, for instance, and then use a claim of value to argue the rightness of solving the problem.

claim of policy uses words like