hey everyone welcome back to coach All rights in today's video we're going to be talking about how to select specific evidence for your AP Lang argument essays before we dive into the tips I would like to take a second to encourage you to subscribe here on YouTube and also over on Tick Tock I'm actually close to 10 000 followers on both platforms so if you subscribe it'll make me one step closer to reaching that goal and also it's a way for me to connect with you AP Lang students and teachers that way I can continue to share my best tips to help you prepare for the AP Lang exam when thinking about selecting evidence for an argument essay AP Lang teachers like to use different mnemonics and honestly I think you just need to choose one it doesn't really matter which one it is because essentially they all do the same thing I personally like the one chores that stands for current events history outside knowledge reading experiences and science the reason I like this one is because it's pretty easy to remember and it covers a wide variety of topics so sometimes when my students are focusing on an argument essay I'll give them a graphic organizer that has one column for each of those letters and I have them brainstorm different evidence that fits the category in terms of a timed right though I don't require my students to have evidence from all the categories in fact I tell them to choose the evidence that best fits the argument that they want to make some of my students are very strong in history probably because they take a push and we have an awesome AP US History teacher at our school and so sometimes those students tend to have more historical examples other students on the other hand might have a personal connection to the prompt because yes you can write about personal experience and so they might have personal experience as their evidence or maybe even current events with chores the category that says outside knowledge is actually one of my favorites because sometimes students tend to all choose very similar examples as their evidence and so the students who are able to incorporate some outside knowledge either of sports or pop culture or music oftentimes these essays are very interesting to read because the evidence is unique so if you're passionate about a specific topic that is relevant to your prompt then go ahead and include those examples as your specific evidence the regardless of which mnemonic you choose whether it's chores or re Hugo or Gophers there's plenty of mnemonics out there and like I said they really all get you to the same place have a mnemonic because that will help you figure out different categories of your evidence which really helps with the brainstorming process because for an argument essay for the AP Lang exam there are no sources it's not like synthesis there is no passage either so if you are the source of your evidence and so you have to rely on what you know now I know this can be intimidating but you are a very smart high school student you have 16 or 17 years of real life experience to draw from you've been sitting in some rigorous classes and so trust yourself that you have plenty of knowledge to draw from also remember that these essays on the exam are viewed as a rough draft so they don't have to be perfect according to the rubric we want students to have specific evidence so one of my tips for you is to avoid general or somewhat specific evidence I think sometimes Under Pressure it can be very easy to generalize for an argument essay but we actually want to avoid doing this because it's not a very convincing argument if your evidence is pretty General we also want to make sure we're sticking to real world evidence and not hypotheticals because hypotheticals usually aren't very convincing so let's look at this particular prompt what is the value of competition so I have two examples here for you one is of General evidence and one is of somewhat specific evidence so that way you can see the difference the general evidence says I've been competitive my whole life especially when it comes to soccer now it's possible that a student could elaborate on this but if this sentence is the only evidence in the paragraph it's very general it does relate to the prompt but it doesn't really prove much of anything so as is this is an example of General evidence but like I said if you were to expand this further then it could be specific evidence but as is it's pretty General now if we look at the somewhat specific evidence we can see how we can take that General evidence and make it a little bit stronger while this is better it's still not quite as detailed or as developed as we want it to be to be considered specific evidence so here is the somewhat specific evidence it says competing for a starting spot on my high school soccer team made me a better player I learned to push myself to get what I want so you can see that the topic here is still soccer it's still personal experience as evidence but it is a little bit more specific we know that the person is fighting for a starting spot and we know that they learn to push themselves as is this is somewhat specific but if we were to add more detail it could become specific so what exactly is specific evidence we know we want to include it in our essays but what exactly is it so specific evidence means detailed developed examples that clearly prove the main idea of the paragraph thus proving your thesis so the keywords there would be detailed and developed as the name suggests we want our specific evidence to be just that specific so it's helpful if you have concrete examples that are real world examples where you can give specific information names dates details you want to make sure that you sound confident in what you're writing about because if you are not confident then your essay is not going to be as convincing in an argument essay your body paragraph can include one or more specific examples I've seen students do this well in different ways so for example one student might have a really strong very developed specific example and that might be the only evidence in the paragraph in a different paragraph the student might have two examples that pair together so they might have a topic sentence and then their first example followed by some commentary and then they might transition into a related example and then more commentary to prove their point so you can have one major example in your body paragraph or you can have a couple related smaller examples that you still develop to prove your point now I said something key there I said evidence and commentary so each example should be followed by commentary because that's your analysis you want to explain how the example proves your thesis and why it's significant the commentary is arguably the most important part of your essay so you want to to make sure that you not only have specific evidence but that you follow it with commentary to explain how the example proves your thesis and remember your thesis is supposed to be answering the prompt I've done other videos on commentary so if you're looking for additional tips then be sure to check out those videos but one quick tip for commentary is to include the word because because the word because gets you to the why and remember the commentary is the why or the analysis you can also use verbs like highlights illustrates suggests demonstrates those are all ways to lead into some commentary as well in the previous two examples I showed you a general evidence and also a somewhat specific evidence now let's transform that into specific evidence because oftentimes we can take General evidence or somewhat specific evidence and with more detail and more development we can make it specific so this is a good way to practice if you are revising an essay let's say that your evidence wasn't quite as strong as you wanted it to be as you're revising add in more concrete detail and make sure you're connecting it to the prompt itself make sure that your example clearly proves your main point so here is that soccer example again but this time it's more developed and more specific and remember the E and the chores mnemonic that I use stands for experience you can write about personal experience in your apline Q3 essay this is one example of how to do it but this would only be a small portion of the essay itself writing about personal experience is a valuable skill for students to have because some AP Lang Q3 prompts do lend themselves to topics that students have personal connections with so it's good to be able to write about your specific personal experiences because quite frankly sometimes those are the best examples you have especially for a timed essay so here's an example of the specific evidence you'll notice that I bolded certain words and phrases here because I wanted to demonstrate some key points where it was clear that this evidence was addressing the prompt so it says as a naturally competitive person I've learned to embrace competition as it allows for personal growth so that would be perhaps a topic sentence it's a claim we have this idea that the person has embraced competition because it leads to personal growth so we can see the value of competition here because there's a positive personal growth now we have the specific evidence last year as a sophomore I competed for the starting goalkeeper spot on my high school soccer team fueled by my desire to be a starter I showed up to practice early and stayed late when I was tired I made sure to dig deep giving my best effort rather than just going through the motions thanks to the extra effort I became stronger faster and more agile because my competitor was a vocal goalie and I was more shy I knew that I needed to work on my communication skills with my team eventually all my extra efforts and competitive Spirit paid off and I was named the starting goalkeeper so you can see that this is a bit more developed it's talking about a specific experience that the person has where they were competitive and they were fueled by that competitive nature and it worked out in their favor so this is the specific evidence now the paragraph itself is not done I have a bullet point there at the bottom it might be covered up on the slide but it says this would be followed by commentary about personal growth so remember we have to have evidence and then commentary develop a specific example and then talk about why that example is important how that example proves your thesis so here presumably the student's thesis was about the relationship between competition and personal growth competition is valuable because it leads to personal growth this example does prove that because the person came out of their shell a little bit they were more communicative and also they put in that extra effort to develop their soccer skills as you are planning your essay and I do recommend that you plan in advance quick outline can be super helpful especially for a timed right you want to prioritize real world examples not hypothetical examples so hypothetical is when you talk about something in kind of a general way like imagine a person who does this or suppose a high school student does this those examples are not very convincing you want to be able to include specific names dates details Etc the next step is to determine which examples best prove your thesis or your main idea and which examples you can write about the best so sometimes we have more ideas than we actually include in our paper so we want to kind of filter out the ideas that we can't write about specifically so we want to think which ones best prove our thesis or which ones we can write about the best hopefully there's a little overlap there as we're thinking about our essay we also want to create a line of reasoning a line of reasoning is a logical progression of ideas so we want to make sure that we have a thesis and that our evidence and commentary prove our thesis we also want to make sure that our main ideas are in a clear order because we want to make sure that our ideas progress in a logical way that's part of the line of reasoning as well so you want to ask yourself what is the best order of my main ideas which one should come first second and if you have a third one which one should be third or last and by the way in case you were wondering it is okay to have two body paragraphs in an AP line essay and also because we're talking about argument essays I get this question all the time do I need to address the counter argument technically the answer is no it can help your essay but it's not required I recommend only doing it if you have a strong counterclaim and rebuttal or concession and refutation something else you want to ask yourself is what is the best way if applicable to pair evidence to prove a main idea so remember that we were talking about how sometimes you might have one example as your evidence and you might develop it into your whole paragraph but other times you might have two related examples to have layers of evidence and commentary if the latter is the case and you're having two examples in the same paragraph you want to think about the best pair of evidence and also what order that evidence should be in so are you going to tell it in chronological order or reverse chronological order basically you want to ask yourself which evidence should come first and which evidence should come second and how am I going to transition between the two but just remember that we want to put commentary after the evidence because if we have a big chunk of evidence two examples one right after the other sometimes that kind of feels like an info jump so we want to break it up with commentary that creates an even analysis so evidence commentary evidence commentary if you're doing two examples in one paragraph thank you so much for watching and before you go please do me a favor and double check that you are subscribed with your notifications turned on and if you like this video and you think that other AP Lang teachers or students would benefit from it then please hit that Thumbs Up Button because liking the video tells YouTube hey this is a quality video that other people would benefit from seeing also if you're a tick tock User make sure that you look up coach All rights over on Tick Tock as well my goal is to get both YouTube and Tick Tock to 10 000 followers by the end of 2022 and I would really appreciate appreciate your support in getting to that goal and if you're watching this video because you have an argument essay coming up best of luck be sure to try to incorporate that specific evidence and until next time happy writing