Welcome back! today I'm going to teach you how to add evidence to your essays
this is an advanced level writing skill that you need to know if you go to high school college or
university in an English-speaking country like the United States I always tell my students that
this is not the most exciting or fun thing that they're going to learn but it's necessary and
after they learn it they feel more comfortable in their classes and they get better grades
on their essays so today I'm going to teach you what evidence is and how to add it to your essays
so first what is evidence? Evidence is information that proves that something is true
the best example is to think of what happens in a courtroom a person has been charged with a crime
and the person is on trial but we don't know if the person committed the crime or not the
lawyer's job is to bring evidence to show that the person committed the crime or that the person did
not commit the crime in our essay we want to use evidence to support our ideas you want to
be sure that we can believe the evidence so you want to look for what we call reliable sources
which are sources that we can trust or that we know are good sources of information so the
first place that you probably want to look is your textbook or newspaper articles we usually
think that evidence should be from an expert or someone who knows a lot about the subject
so how do we use evidence in our essays you want to think that most of the essay is your
own discussion based on what you know about the topic so you're going to think about what you
have learned in your class from listening to your professor discussing with classmates and reading
your book and then you want to discuss the idea based on that knowledge that you already have
however you're going to use pieces of evidence in your paragraphs
to help to support or make your ideas stronger to show that your ideas are true to do that
you want to think that your paragraph should be mostly your own discussion of the topic and then
there will be some pieces of evidence to support your ideas so maybe the paragraph has about 25%
of the sentences are evidence definitely not more than 50% maybe in one paragraph you have one or
two sentences of evidence to support your ideas it depends on the topic and the type of essay
that you're writing but that's a good general guideline okay so how to add evidence to your
paragraphs the first thing you're going to do is find a piece of evidence that supports your ideas
and again you're going to look for evidence in good sources this can be a sentence or two
sometimes statistics that support your idea for example if you're writing an essay about your
city you might want to say that the city where you live is safe well how can you show that it's safe
you might explain that based on your own experience it is safe like when you walk
outside at night you feel safe but that's really just your own opinion or your experience so then
you would want to get evidence in this case we would probably look for statistics about crime
rates to show how many crimes happen in that city or we might look for numbers that show how safe
your city is compared to another city that would be a good use of evidence so again the first step
is to look for a piece of evidence you also want to be sure that the evidence is directly related
to the idea that means that you have to read the evidence carefully sometimes with evidence this
can be tricky so you just want to be careful that the evidence supports your idea after you
find the evidence that you want to use it's time for you to decide if you're going to paraphrase
or quote paraphrase means that you take the idea from the source and you put it in your essay but
you rewrite the sentence in your own words paraphrasing in another language is very
difficult so if English is not your first language you probably need to practice this
it's not easy but you can do it if you practice quote is different quote means that you take the
sentence from the source and you copy it word for word exactly and then put it in your essay
and you begin and end the quote with quotation marks that shows that it is a quote quoting is
much easier because all you have to do is copy the sentence into your essay and add quotation marks
but we don't use quotes as often as we use paraphrases we prefer paraphrases in our essay
so when you're deciding should I paraphrase or quote you're going to choose paraphrasing most
of the time however it is okay to use a quote in the following three situations number one
the sentence is said with very beautiful or special language this is common like if you get
the sentence from a book that was written very beautifully or from a poem or maybe a speech
perhaps if you paraphrase that the beautiful language will be lost so you want to keep the
original sentence number two the sentence was said by a famous person if you use a speech that was
said by Barack Obama you will copy the sentence and use a quote in your essay because you don't
want to change the words that were said by a famous person number three if the sentence from
the source includes so many very difficult words and specific terminology that it's very difficult
for you to paraphrase it then you can use a quote in that case you're going to use a quote to avoid
making mistakes in your paraphrase or writing a paraphrase that is not clear so now that you've
decided if you're going to paraphrase or quote it's time to add the evidence to your paragraph
so for this example that I'm going to show you I am a student in a biology class and I am writing
an essay about the disease malaria we've talked about it a lot in class and I know enough about
this topic that I can write an essay but I'm going to need some evidence to support my ideas
for example one of the things I want to say is that the disease malaria is very serious that it
kills a lot of people so what I did was I went to my textbook and I looked for a statistic or some
other evidence to show how serious this disease is and I found this sentence that I want to use
this sentence is directly related to my idea which is that this is a serious disease so this
evidence works because it shows how many people it affects around the world or that it's a very
serious and deadly disease so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to decide if I'm
going to paraphrase or quote so for this example I'm going to paraphrase why well first of all
because paraphrasing is preferred second I'm going to think about the criteria for quoting is this
said with very beautiful or special language? No. Is it spoken by a famous person? No. Is this sentence
so difficult with very specific terminology that I cannot paraphrase it? No. So I'm going to paraphrase
so before I paraphrase I'm going to make sure that I understand the meaning of the sentence
what does this sentence mean well it means that when we look at all the infectious diseases around
the world malaria is number five when we think about the number of people who die so I'm going to
try to say that sentence in my own words just like I did now when I told you what the sentence means
here's my paraphrase among infectious diseases worldwide malaria is number five in terms of
the number of people who die so you can see that my paraphrase is not fancy in fact it's a little
longer than the original sentence which usually is not really the best type of paraphrase but for now
it's okay because my paraphrase is written in my own words it's clear and the meaning is the same
as the original sentence next to put the evidence in my paragraph I need to do one more thing I
need to show where I got this information this is called a citation a citation is information
about the source to show where I got the evidence is it from a book or an article and then that way
the reader of the essay my professor can find this source afterwards the other thing that I need to
know is does my class use MLA style or APA style there are different ways to make these citations
and you have to know what style your class uses for English classes we use MLA so in my class
we use MLA but in science classes like biology they use APA so let me show you what MLA looks
like first we're going to use a signal phrase to show that evidence is coming and we're going
to include the author's last name and the page number so here is my sentence with the citation
you can see that I have the name Pakenham et al. that is the last name of the author but then I
have these two small words et al. what does that mean that's an abbreviation that means and others
so when you use a citation you're going to use the last name of the author but if there's more than
one author then you need to follow a rule if there are two authors you just use the two last names
if there are three or more authors then you use the last name of the first author
and then you use the abbreviation et al. to mean and others finally at the end of the sentence we
put the page number in parentheses this is the page number where I found the evidence so again
the purpose of this is to show that this is not my idea that I found this evidence in some source
also that way my professor can find this evidence later the professor can go to the book and look
at the page number to see the information most science classes use APA style so in APA style it's
a little bit different they don't include the page number for a paraphrase and instead they include
the year so the year that the book was published and here is what that would look like okay so now
that you have your evidence in your paragraph you want to think about what you're going to do
for the rest of your essay and a good writer doesn't use the same words over and over again
so we're going to try to learn a couple of other ways to add evidence so that you don't
repeat yourself with according to according to so I'm going to show you three examples of how you
can do this and we're going to look at MLA style first so the first one is what we looked at before
according to plus the author comma the paraphrase and then the page number at the end in the second
one we're going to add the article title according to pack and ham at all in the article malaria a
portrait of a disease comma the evidence or the paraphrase and the page number at the end notice
that for an article title we put that in quotation marks for the last one we're going to begin with
in the article “Malaria a portrait of a disease” comma Pakenham et al. state that
and the page number at the end notice for the last one that we're using a verb to show
what the author said you can use state or claim or show and you always use simple present tense
that's just a tricky thing that you need to remember even though the author wrote it
in the past we use present tense to show what the author says when you read it finally I want you
to notice that there is one other option that is a little bit easier if you've already used
according to a few times then you can use this other one too and this would be an example where
maybe you introduce the evidence the first time with according to and then after that you might
use this one in this case you just have the sentence or the paraphrase and then you just put
the citation at the end of the sentence so here you can see Pakenham et al. and the page number
at the end of the sentence in parentheses let's look at these same examples in APA
notice that for the first one we're not going to include the page number but we're going
to include the year in parentheses that comes right after the author's last name
according to is not used in APA as often so I'm going to move on to the next one with the author's
last name and the verb in the article “Malaria a portrait of a disease” comma Pakenham et al. 2013
state that and the last one we are going to um do the same thing that I showed you before where
we put the citation at the end of the sentence but again just notice that you use the last name
comma and the year I suggest that when you write you have these sentences printed out next to you
so that when you're writing your essay you can just copy those structures when you add evidence
we're almost finished but I need to show you one more thing many of your sources are going
to be from articles on the internet and that is just a little bit different so for an article
on the internet you're going to look for the author's name if there is no author listed
then you're going to go to the second piece of information which is the title of the article
articles on the internet don't have page numbers like books do so you're not going
to use a page number remember that if you're using APA style you need to include the year
and if there's no year listed on your article then you're going to use the abbreviation n period
d period which stands for no date so let's look at an example here's the evidence that I found in an
article on the internet the estimated number of malaria deaths stood at 405,000 in 2018.
here's my paraphrase: In 2018 the number of deaths caused by malaria was about 405,000.
so we're going to put this evidence into the paragraph and I need to first check if there is
an author and I'm going to use the author's last name if I am using APA I also need to look and see
if there is a year there are no page numbers on the internet so I don't need to worry about that
when I look for the author's name I notice that there is no author listed however this article
is from the World Health Organization website the World Health Organization is an organization or
group of people who wrote this article so I can actually use that group's name for the author so
the paraphrase would look like this according to the World Health Organization comma my paraphrase
now again if I'm using APA I would add the year the last step is that you have to take all of
your sources that you used in your paragraphs and make a list of them that goes on the last page of
your essay this page is called Works Cited in MLA it's called References in APA there are a lot of
rules for how to do that but it is something that you can do but I'm not going to show those to you
today I'll make another video in the future that will show you how to do that so to sum up here are
the basic things that you need to know about how to put evidence into your essay first you're going
to look for evidence in reliable sources you want to make sure that the evidence is directly related
to the idea that you are trying to explain next you're going to decide if you should paraphrase or
quote remember that paraphrase is more common and you want to use more paraphrases than quotes
if paraphrasing is very difficult for you just start with paraphrasing maybe one or two and
then try to practice so that you can do it more often remember that it is okay to use a quote if
the sentence is said with very beautiful or special language it was spoken by a famous person
or it has very advanced specific terminology that is almost impossible for you to paraphrase
next you're going to put that sentence into your essay but you need to include a citation that
shows where the information came from what is the source you need to know if your class uses
MLA or APA and then you're going to follow the rule for how to make the citation
finally don't forget to include the sources in a list that goes on the last page of your
essay this is called the works cited or references my last piece of advice for you
is don't feel scared you can do these things but you just need to pay attention and
go step by step there are lots of websites that have information about how to do this
so just keep practicing keep trying and you can do it that's all for today if you have
questions please let me know and I would really appreciate it if you could give this video a like
or maybe share it with other students that you know thank you so much and take care!