The Op-Ed That Cites a Rival
A student writes an op-ed arguing the city should fund bike lanes. In paragraph 3, she writes: "Critics claim bike lanes hurt small business. But a 2019 study of 14 retail corridors found sales rose after lane installation." Her teacher marks this passage as weak evidence and asks her to revise. The student protests that the study is peer-reviewed, recent enough, and directly on point-the strongest source she has. She has not read the critics she names; she found the phrase "critics claim" in another op-ed. She also has not checked whether the 2019 study's corridors resemble her city.
1. Is the teacher right that the passage is weak evidence? Distinguish between the quality of the source and the quality of its use.
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Both are true at different levels. The 2019 study may be a strong source in itself-peer-reviewed, recent, on topic. But evidence quality in an argument depends on how it's deployed. Two problems: (1) The critics are unnamed and unread, so the "critics claim" is a straw figure; the writer can't show she's responding to the actual strongest objection, only to a paraphrase she borrowed. (2) The study's relevance to this city is unestablished; 14 corridors elsewhere don't automatically generalize. The teacher is right that the passage is weak even if the source is strong. Citing a good study in a way that doesn't engage the real counterargument or establish fit is a reasoning failure, not a sourcing failure.
2. Name the two revisions that would most improve the passage's evidentiary reasoning, and say what each fixes.
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First, name and accurately represent at least one actual critic and their specific claim (e.g., a local business association's stated concern about delivery access), which fixes the straw-figure problem by making the rebuttal answer a real objection. Second, add one sentence establishing comparability-corridor type, city size, baseline sales-or concede the limit ("corridors like ours"), which fixes the generalization gap by telling the reader how far the finding travels. Each revision targets a distinct flaw: one addresses what is being rebutted, the other addresses how far the evidence reaches.