📖 The Paragraph That Starts in the Wrong Place
📖 The Paragraph That Starts in the Wrong Place
A student is analysing how a speech about climate change uses language. They write: “In line 14, the writer uses the metaphor ‘a ticking clock’. This is a metaphor. It suggests urgency.”
The paragraph has started from a feature rather than from a thought. It tells the examiner what to look at before giving any reason to care. The L4 paragraph begins from the opposite direction: “The writer constructs a sense of irreversible urgency, choosing the metaphor of a clock’s mechanism to position time itself as an agent of catastrophe rather than a neutral measure.” The claim comes first. The evidence serves it.
Claim-first architecture means opening every analytical paragraph with an interpretive claim — a sentence that names your reading of the text — before you introduce any quotation or technique. The claim is the point; the evidence is the proof of the point. Getting that order right is the single structural h
Now try it yourself
Quiz · Question 1 of 10
Which of these sentences is a claim rather than a feature-spot?
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