Hỏi "ai, cái gì, ở đâu, khi nào, và tại sao" là một công thức rằng các nhà báo, thám tử, và các nhà nghiên cứu sử dụng để có được một câu chuyện hoàn chỉnh. Kỹ thuật này đặc biệt hữu ích khi bạn đang lựa chọn một chủ đề bài luận và khi tập trung vào một chủ đề một khi bạn đã thực hiện một lựa chọn. | PROVIDING SUPPORT An opinion is something believed to have happened something believed to be true something believed to exist Facts are what we know they are objective and therefore do not change from person to person. Opinions are what we believe they are subjective and debatable and they often change from person to person. Because facts are objective they re particularly valuable as evidence in an essay especially when your thesis is controversial. Facts include statistics definitions recorded statements and observations. For example a writer is drafting an essay assessing the flat tax from her outline Lesson 6 . Here is her thesis A flat tax would be good for the government and for citizens. To support it she could include the following facts The IRS publishes 480 different tax forms. The IRB publishes 280 different tax forms to explain those 480 tax forms. The body of the tax law has million words ten times the number of words in the Bible. The cost of income tax compliance is over billion a year some sources estimate the cost as high as 2 billion . Practice 1 Choose one of the essays for which you developed an outline in Lesson 6 or 7. List at least four supporting ideas for your thesis. Include at least one specific example and at least one fact. A Note about Statistics Statistics may seem like the most uncontestable kind of fact after all numbers are objective. But numbers can be and often are manipulated in many ways including being taken out of context. Alert readers will want to see the source of your statistics to be sure the figures are unbiased. We ll explore this issue further in Lesson 11. 79 ----------------------------------- PROVIDING SUPPORT ------------------------------------------- Reasons For many essays the best way to support your thesis is to explain why you think the way you do. That explanation will lay out your reasons some will be facts others will be opinions. The key to this type of support is logic. Your reasons must be .
