Point 20: Staying Specific

Avoid broad claims unnecessary to your particular argument. Faced with the tricky task of opening or closing a paper, some writers will fall back on wide-ranging generalizations: "Throughout history, humans have feared death," they might begin, or "Until modern times, society offered little freedom, especially to women." Some such statements can be defended, and some cannot; either way, they nearly always distract writer and reader from the meat of your argument.

One way to test your claims is to see whether they could work as well in totally different papers. (Note how little the above examples tell you about the overall direction of an argument.) The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge tells of his boyhood teacher who expressed this notion more colorfully than I:

     there was one custom of our master's, which 
     I  cannot pass over in silence, because 
     I think it imitable and worthy of imitation.  
     He would often permit our theme exercises, 
     under some pretext of want of time, to
     accumulate, till each lad had four or five
     to be looked over.  Then placing the whole  
     number abreast on his desk, he would ask the  
     writer, whether this or that sentence 
     might not have found as appropriate a place 
     under this or that other thesis; and if no 
     satisfying answer could be returned, and two
     faults of the same kind were found in one 
     exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, 
     the exercise was torn up, and another on the 
     same subject to be produced, in addition to 
     the tasks of the day.