Drafting an Argument

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Main Claim or Thesis of Paper: Professor X is a good teacher and should retain her job at CSU.

Introduction: Agues that determining whether Professor X is a good teacher involves evaluating her performance against criteria for good teachers.

Body of Argument: Works through several criteria to judge Professor X's teaching quality.

Topic Sentence Example: The first and probably most important criteria for judging the quality of a teacher is student opinion and, by any measure of student opinion-course evaluations, interviews, and class enrollment-Professor X is clearly one of the best teachers at CSU.

[Paper goes on to offer summaries of all three forms of proof listed and then moves onto the second criteria with a topic sentence that ties back to the overall judgment of Prof. X as a good teacher.]