Tips on Writing AP Essays: Using Evidence

What are we learning today? 

When writing any kind of persuasive essay, it's very important to include some kind of evidence that backs your point up. Otherwise, you could just tell people stuff, and they'd believe you! For no reason! I mean, you could say stuff like "Our president is a socialist" or "The poor are leeching money out of your veins and using it to buy heroin and condoms" and people would be all "Wow, I didn't know that! How much should I make this check out for to your super PAC?"

Well we don't want that. So today's lesson will teach you how to include evidence to write college-level essays that fairly leap off the screen and choke the reader with their awesomeness.

A Valuable Point: Make sure you have a lot of evidence. A lot. 

Consider the following assertion:

George Carlin swears a lot. 

Now who's going to believe that? No one, right? For one thing, George Carlin is dead! How can you swear when you're not even alive? For another thing, just because you say he swears a lot doesn't mean I'm going to believe you. You could be lying. You could be from another planet, desperately trying to blend into our Earth culture and just making stuff up about George Carlin and swears. And what's a swear? How am I supposed to know a technical term like that? And who are you? What language are you speaking? How am I able to read this? I'm totally lost! Agh!

So, in order to keep me from whaling you over the head and giving you an anal probe to determine your species, you need to embed quotes or facts of some kind to back up your assertion. Like this:

George Carlin, a dead comedian, swore a lot while he was still alive. Swears are words that are taboo in civilized society, and Carlin tended to say them a lot. For example, in a concert performance in New York, he once said, "Damn." That's a swear. It shows how he used to swear when he was alive. 

See? It's very important to include details the reader already knows, so they know you're human.

An Even More Valuable Point: Quote as much material as you need to, and then some. 

If one were to actually write an essay about George Carlin, you'd have to include some material about him, what he talked about, his beliefs, gender, race, shoe size, birth sign and dental hygiene. All of these are relevant details when discussing his use of language. So, let's pretend that your teacher has asked you to analyze his use of metaphor. Consider this excerpt:

Carlin's use of metaphors was very good because it allowed him to get his point across. For example, once at a nightclub he said, "Have you ever noticed how everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac? You're like 'Hey, look at that idiot!' and 'Whoah, slow down, maniac!' That's crazy. People are crazy, man. Like this woman I once talked to at a book store. I asked her where the Self-Help section was and she said that would defeat the whole purpose. Crazy, man. This world is a freak show. A real freak show. When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat." That "freak show" part was a metaphor, which really helps George Carlin, an American comedian who is not an alien and knows what swears are, get his point across, which is that capitalism sucks. 

Did you see how that worked? You need to have long, rambling quotes that say absolutely nothing about the main point. It's even better if you don't have a main point at all, because that way, you can pick pretty much whatever evidence you like and link it to your thesis. That way, when your teacher OD's on Dramamine and passes out on the floor, you can always visit her at the hospital and tell her, "Look, I used evidence and a citation! What more do you want?"

One more very very valuable point: Repetition works. It works. Repetition, that is. 

I think we can all agree that people are vapid, unthinking automatons who shuffle aimlessly through life at the expense of independent thought. So we need to write accordingly and stress our evidence through repetition. That way, our point will sink in even more effectively. Here's an opening to an essay about George Carlin's style of speaking:

George Carlin was a comedian who was very funny. In his speech, he used a lot of figurative language, like metaphors, similes, personification, words, syllables, Volkswagens, butter and mayonnaise. This figurative language, which was used by George Carlin in his speech "The Seven Dirty Things People Say With Words," really was useful in his comedy, because, since he was a comedian, he needed to worry about making people laugh. And they did laugh, because of his figurative language, which I mentioned earlier. 

Notice that at this point, a followup comment on my part isn't even necessary.

Concluding Thoughts:

So, there you go. Evidence makes the argument, facts make evidence, you don't need to understand facts in order for them to be true and you're about to get an anal probe. Now go write that essay. And remember me when you get into Stanford.

This man is the perfect metaphor for like, you know, whatever.