📖 Three Types of Evidence, One Recognition Move
📖 Three Types of Evidence, One Recognition Move
A student in a magazine competition wrote: “Processed food is slowly killing us. Scientists say it is bad. The figures are shocking.” They lost to a student who wrote: “Processed food, argues Professor Helen Farrow of UCL, is now the single largest factor in avoidable early death in the UK — a truth the industry has spent forty years and £2.3 billion burying.”
Same claim. Completely different persuasive force. The difference is not confidence — it is evidence type. AQA Q5 rewards writers who know which kind of evidence to use and what to do with it.
English Language glossary
- What are the three evidence moves in persuasive writing, and what does each one do?
- <strong>Metaphor</strong> — makes an abstract idea vivid and physical; sneaks an argument past the reader’s critical defences by making them see the comparison before they can object to it.<br><br><strong>Expert citation</strong> — borrows authority from a named, credible source; positions the writer’s view as part of established consensus rather than personal opinion.<br><br><strong>Statistics</strong> — grounds the argument in measurable scale; converts individual sympathy into a sense of systemic, universal pattern.<br><br><strong>Key rule:</strong> all three require a <em>function sentence</em> after them — the sentence explaining what the evidence achieves is where the marks live.
There are three types of evidence available to persuasive writers. Each type does a different job. Recognising the type is the first move; the second is explaining its persuasive function.
Now try it yourself
Quiz · Question 1 of 10
Which of these sentences is an example of a metaphor used as persuasive evidence?
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