Critical analysis examples of theories
The following sentences are examples of the phrases used to explain strengths and weaknesses.
Smith’s (2005) theory appears up to date, practical and applicable across many divergent settings.
Brown’s (2010) theory, although parsimonious and logical, lacks a sufficient body of evidence to support its propositions and predictions
Little scientific evidence has been presented to support the premises of this theory.
One of the limitations with this theory is that it does not explain why…
A significant strength of this model is that it takes into account …
The propositions of this model appear unambiguous and logical.
A key problem with this framework is the conceptual inconsistency between ….
The table below summarizes the criteria for judging the strengths and weaknesses of a concept:
Evaluating Concepts
Key variables or constructs identified | key variables or constructs omitted or missed |
Clear, well-defined, specific, precise | ambiguous, vague, ill-defined, overly general, imprecise, not sufficiently distinctive overinclusive, too broad, or narrowly defined |
Meaningful, useful | conceptually flawed |
Logical | contradictory |
Relevant | questionable relevance |
Up-to-date | out of date |
Critical analysis examples of concepts
Many researchers have used the concept of control in different ways.
There is little consensus about what constitutes automaticity.
Putting forth a very general definition of motivation means that it is possible that any behaviour could be included.
The concept of global education lacks clarity, is imprecisely defined and is overly complex.
Some have questioned the usefulness of resilience as a concept because it has been used so often and in so many contexts.
Research suggests that the concept of preoperative fasting is an outdated clinical approach.
The table below summarizes the criteria for judging the strengths and weaknesses of an argument, viewpoint or idea:
Evaluating Arguments, Views or Ideas
Reasons and evidence provided support the argument | the reasons or evidence do not support the argument - overgeneralization |
Substantiated (supported) by factual evidence | insufficient substantiation (support) |
Evidence is relevant and believable | Based on peripheral or irrelevant evidence |
Unbiased: sufficient or important evidence or ideas included and considered. | biased: overlooks, omits, disregards, or is selective with important or relevant evidence or ideas. |
Evidence from reputable or authoritative sources | evidence relies on non reputable or unrecognized sources |
Balanced: considers opposing views | unbalanced: does not consider opposing views |
Clear, not confused, unambiguous | confused, ambiguous |
Logical, consistent | the reasons do not follow logically from and support the arguments; arguments or ideas are inconsistent |
Convincing | unconvincing |
Critical analysis examples of arguments, viewpoints or ideas
The validity of this argument is questionable as there is insufficient evidence to support it.
Many writers have challenged Jones’ claim on the grounds that …….
This argument fails to draw on the evidence of others in the field.
This explanation is incomplete because it does not explain why…
The key problem with this explanation is that ……
The existing accounts fail to resolve the contradiction between …
However, there is an inconsistency with this argument. The inconsistency lies in…
Although this argument has been proposed by some, it lacks justification.
However, the body of evidence showing that… contradicts this argument.
The table below provides the criteria for judging the strengths and weaknesses of methodology.
An evaluation of a methodology usually involves a critical analysis of its main sections:
design; sampling (participants); measurement tools and materials; procedure
Evaluating a Methodology
Research design tests the hypotheses or research questions | research design is inappropriate for the hypotheses or research questions |
Valid and reliable method | dubious, questionable validity |
The method addresses potential sources of bias or measurement error. confounding variables were identified | insufficiently rigorous measurement error produces questionable or unreliable confounding variables not identified or addressed |
The method (sample, measurement tools, procedure) allows results to be generalized or transferred. Sampling was representative to enable generalization | generalizability of the results is limited due to an unrepresentative sample: small sample size or limited sample range |
Sampling of cohort was representative to enable generalization sampling of phenomena under investigation sufficiently wide and representative sampling response rate was sufficiently high | limited generalizability of results due to unrepresentative sample: small sample size or limited sample range of cohort or phenomena under investigation sampling response rate was too low |
Measurement tool(s) / instrument(s), appropriate, reliable and valid measurements were accurate | inappropriate measurement tools; incomplete or ambiguous scale items inaccurate measurement reliability statistics from previous research for measurement tool not reported measurement instrument items are ambiguous, unclear, contradictory |
Procedure reliable and valid | Measurement error from administration of the measurement tool(s) |
Method was clearly explained and sufficiently detailed to allow replication | Explanation of the methodology (or parts of it, for example the Procedure) is unclear, confused, imprecise, ambiguous, inconsistent or contradictory |
Critical analysis examples of a methodology
The unrepresentativeness of the sample makes these results misleading.
The presence of unmeasured variables in this study limits the interpretation of the results.
Other, unmeasured confounding variables may be influencing this association.
The interpretation of the data requires caution because the effect of confounding variables was not taken into account.
The insufficient control of several response biases in this study means the results are likely to be unreliable.
Although this correlational study shows association between the variables, it does not establish a causal relationship.
Taken together, the methodological shortcomings of this study suggest the need for serious caution in the meaningful interpretation of the study’s results.
The table below provides the criteria for judging the strengths and weaknesses of research results and conclusions:
Evaluating the Results and Conclusions
Chose and used appropriate statistics | inappropriate choice or use of statistics |
Results interpreted correctly or accurately | incorrect interpretation of results the results have been over-interpreted For example: correlation measures have been incorrectly interpreted to suggest causation rather than association |
All results were explained, including inconsistent or misleading results | inconsistent or misleading results not explained |
Alternative explanations for results were considered | unbalanced explanations: alternative explanations for results not explored |
Significance of all results were considered | incomplete consideration of results |
Results considered according to consistency with other research or viewpoints Results are conclusive because they have been replicated by other studies | consistency of results with other research not considered results are suggestive rather than conclusive because they have not been replicated by other studies |
Results add significantly to existing understanding or knowledge | results do not significantly add to existing understanding knowledge |
Limitations of the research design or method are acknowledged | limitations of the research design or method not considered |
Results were clearly explained, sufficiently detailed, consistent | results were unclear, insufficiently detailed, inconsistent, confusing, ambiguous, contradictory |
Conclusions were consistent with and supported by the results | conclusions were not consistent with or not supported by the results |
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Analysis is a central writing skill in academic writing. Essentially, analysis is what writers do with evidence to make meaning of it. While there are specific disciplinary types of analysis (e.g., rhetorical, discourse, close reading, etc.), most analysis involves zooming into evidence to understand how the specific parts work and how their specific function might relate to a larger whole. That is, we usually need to zoom into the details and then reflect on the larger picture. In this writing guide, we cover analysis basics briefly and then offer some strategies for deepening your analysis. Deepening your analysis means pushing your thinking further, developing a more insightful and interesting answer to the “so what?” question, and elevating your writing.
Questions to Ask of the Text:
Strategies & Explanation
Not all of these strategies work every time, but usually employing one of them is enough to really help elevate the ideas and intellectual work of a paper:
A Link to a PDF Handout of this Writing Guide
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Published on January 30, 2020 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on August 14, 2023.
Literary analysis means closely studying a text, interpreting its meanings, and exploring why the author made certain choices. It can be applied to novels, short stories, plays, poems, or any other form of literary writing.
A literary analysis essay is not a rhetorical analysis , nor is it just a summary of the plot or a book review. Instead, it is a type of argumentative essay where you need to analyze elements such as the language, perspective, and structure of the text, and explain how the author uses literary devices to create effects and convey ideas.
Before beginning a literary analysis essay, it’s essential to carefully read the text and c ome up with a thesis statement to keep your essay focused. As you write, follow the standard structure of an academic essay :
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Step 1: reading the text and identifying literary devices, step 2: coming up with a thesis, step 3: writing a title and introduction, step 4: writing the body of the essay, step 5: writing a conclusion, other interesting articles.
The first step is to carefully read the text(s) and take initial notes. As you read, pay attention to the things that are most intriguing, surprising, or even confusing in the writing—these are things you can dig into in your analysis.
Your goal in literary analysis is not simply to explain the events described in the text, but to analyze the writing itself and discuss how the text works on a deeper level. Primarily, you’re looking out for literary devices —textual elements that writers use to convey meaning and create effects. If you’re comparing and contrasting multiple texts, you can also look for connections between different texts.
To get started with your analysis, there are several key areas that you can focus on. As you analyze each aspect of the text, try to think about how they all relate to each other. You can use highlights or notes to keep track of important passages and quotes.
Consider what style of language the author uses. Are the sentences short and simple or more complex and poetic?
What word choices stand out as interesting or unusual? Are words used figuratively to mean something other than their literal definition? Figurative language includes things like metaphor (e.g. “her eyes were oceans”) and simile (e.g. “her eyes were like oceans”).
Also keep an eye out for imagery in the text—recurring images that create a certain atmosphere or symbolize something important. Remember that language is used in literary texts to say more than it means on the surface.
Ask yourself:
Is it a first-person narrator (“I”) who is personally involved in the story, or a third-person narrator who tells us about the characters from a distance?
Consider the narrator’s perspective . Is the narrator omniscient (where they know everything about all the characters and events), or do they only have partial knowledge? Are they an unreliable narrator who we are not supposed to take at face value? Authors often hint that their narrator might be giving us a distorted or dishonest version of events.
The tone of the text is also worth considering. Is the story intended to be comic, tragic, or something else? Are usually serious topics treated as funny, or vice versa ? Is the story realistic or fantastical (or somewhere in between)?
Consider how the text is structured, and how the structure relates to the story being told.
Think about why the author chose to divide the different parts of the text in the way they did.
There are also less formal structural elements to take into account. Does the story unfold in chronological order, or does it jump back and forth in time? Does it begin in medias res —in the middle of the action? Does the plot advance towards a clearly defined climax?
With poetry, consider how the rhyme and meter shape your understanding of the text and your impression of the tone. Try reading the poem aloud to get a sense of this.
In a play, you might consider how relationships between characters are built up through different scenes, and how the setting relates to the action. Watch out for dramatic irony , where the audience knows some detail that the characters don’t, creating a double meaning in their words, thoughts, or actions.
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Your thesis in a literary analysis essay is the point you want to make about the text. It’s the core argument that gives your essay direction and prevents it from just being a collection of random observations about a text.
If you’re given a prompt for your essay, your thesis must answer or relate to the prompt. For example:
Is Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” a religious parable?
Your thesis statement should be an answer to this question—not a simple yes or no, but a statement of why this is or isn’t the case:
Franz Kafka’s “Before the Law” is not a religious parable, but a story about bureaucratic alienation.
Sometimes you’ll be given freedom to choose your own topic; in this case, you’ll have to come up with an original thesis. Consider what stood out to you in the text; ask yourself questions about the elements that interested you, and consider how you might answer them.
Your thesis should be something arguable—that is, something that you think is true about the text, but which is not a simple matter of fact. It must be complex enough to develop through evidence and arguments across the course of your essay.
Say you’re analyzing the novel Frankenstein . You could start by asking yourself:
Your initial answer might be a surface-level description:
The character Frankenstein is portrayed negatively in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .
However, this statement is too simple to be an interesting thesis. After reading the text and analyzing its narrative voice and structure, you can develop the answer into a more nuanced and arguable thesis statement:
Mary Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.
Remember that you can revise your thesis statement throughout the writing process , so it doesn’t need to be perfectly formulated at this stage. The aim is to keep you focused as you analyze the text.
To support your thesis statement, your essay will build an argument using textual evidence —specific parts of the text that demonstrate your point. This evidence is quoted and analyzed throughout your essay to explain your argument to the reader.
It can be useful to comb through the text in search of relevant quotations before you start writing. You might not end up using everything you find, and you may have to return to the text for more evidence as you write, but collecting textual evidence from the beginning will help you to structure your arguments and assess whether they’re convincing.
To start your literary analysis paper, you’ll need two things: a good title, and an introduction.
Your title should clearly indicate what your analysis will focus on. It usually contains the name of the author and text(s) you’re analyzing. Keep it as concise and engaging as possible.
A common approach to the title is to use a relevant quote from the text, followed by a colon and then the rest of your title.
If you struggle to come up with a good title at first, don’t worry—this will be easier once you’ve begun writing the essay and have a better sense of your arguments.
“Fearful symmetry” : The violence of creation in William Blake’s “The Tyger”
The essay introduction provides a quick overview of where your argument is going. It should include your thesis statement and a summary of the essay’s structure.
A typical structure for an introduction is to begin with a general statement about the text and author, using this to lead into your thesis statement. You might refer to a commonly held idea about the text and show how your thesis will contradict it, or zoom in on a particular device you intend to focus on.
Then you can end with a brief indication of what’s coming up in the main body of the essay. This is called signposting. It will be more elaborate in longer essays, but in a short five-paragraph essay structure, it shouldn’t be more than one sentence.
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, protagonist Victor Frankenstein is a stable representation of the callous ambition of modern science throughout the novel. This essay, however, argues that far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to portray Frankenstein in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as. This essay begins by exploring the positive portrayal of Frankenstein in the first volume, then moves on to the creature’s perception of him, and finally discusses the third volume’s narrative shift toward viewing Frankenstein as the creature views him.
Some students prefer to write the introduction later in the process, and it’s not a bad idea. After all, you’ll have a clearer idea of the overall shape of your arguments once you’ve begun writing them!
If you do write the introduction first, you should still return to it later to make sure it lines up with what you ended up writing, and edit as necessary.
The body of your essay is everything between the introduction and conclusion. It contains your arguments and the textual evidence that supports them.
A typical structure for a high school literary analysis essay consists of five paragraphs : the three paragraphs of the body, plus the introduction and conclusion.
Each paragraph in the main body should focus on one topic. In the five-paragraph model, try to divide your argument into three main areas of analysis, all linked to your thesis. Don’t try to include everything you can think of to say about the text—only analysis that drives your argument.
In longer essays, the same principle applies on a broader scale. For example, you might have two or three sections in your main body, each with multiple paragraphs. Within these sections, you still want to begin new paragraphs at logical moments—a turn in the argument or the introduction of a new idea.
Robert’s first encounter with Gil-Martin suggests something of his sinister power. Robert feels “a sort of invisible power that drew me towards him.” He identifies the moment of their meeting as “the beginning of a series of adventures which has puzzled myself, and will puzzle the world when I am no more in it” (p. 89). Gil-Martin’s “invisible power” seems to be at work even at this distance from the moment described; before continuing the story, Robert feels compelled to anticipate at length what readers will make of his narrative after his approaching death. With this interjection, Hogg emphasizes the fatal influence Gil-Martin exercises from his first appearance.
To keep your points focused, it’s important to use a topic sentence at the beginning of each paragraph.
A good topic sentence allows a reader to see at a glance what the paragraph is about. It can introduce a new line of argument and connect or contrast it with the previous paragraph. Transition words like “however” or “moreover” are useful for creating smooth transitions:
… The story’s focus, therefore, is not upon the divine revelation that may be waiting beyond the door, but upon the mundane process of aging undergone by the man as he waits.
Nevertheless, the “radiance” that appears to stream from the door is typically treated as religious symbolism.
This topic sentence signals that the paragraph will address the question of religious symbolism, while the linking word “nevertheless” points out a contrast with the previous paragraph’s conclusion.
A key part of literary analysis is backing up your arguments with relevant evidence from the text. This involves introducing quotes from the text and explaining their significance to your point.
It’s important to contextualize quotes and explain why you’re using them; they should be properly introduced and analyzed, not treated as self-explanatory:
It isn’t always necessary to use a quote. Quoting is useful when you’re discussing the author’s language, but sometimes you’ll have to refer to plot points or structural elements that can’t be captured in a short quote.
In these cases, it’s more appropriate to paraphrase or summarize parts of the text—that is, to describe the relevant part in your own words:
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The conclusion of your analysis shouldn’t introduce any new quotations or arguments. Instead, it’s about wrapping up the essay. Here, you summarize your key points and try to emphasize their significance to the reader.
A good way to approach this is to briefly summarize your key arguments, and then stress the conclusion they’ve led you to, highlighting the new perspective your thesis provides on the text as a whole:
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By tracing the depiction of Frankenstein through the novel’s three volumes, I have demonstrated how the narrative structure shifts our perception of the character. While the Frankenstein of the first volume is depicted as having innocent intentions, the second and third volumes—first in the creature’s accusatory voice, and then in his own voice—increasingly undermine him, causing him to appear alternately ridiculous and vindictive. Far from the one-dimensional villain he is often taken to be, the character of Frankenstein is compelling because of the dynamic narrative frame in which he is placed. In this frame, Frankenstein’s narrative self-presentation responds to the images of him we see from others’ perspectives. This conclusion sheds new light on the novel, foregrounding Shelley’s unique layering of narrative perspectives and its importance for the depiction of character.
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Beyond introducing and integrating your paraphrases and quotations, you also need to analyze the evidence in your paragraphs. Analysis is your opportunity to contextualize and explain the evidence for your reader. Your analysis might tell the reader why the evidence is important, what it means, or how it connects to other ideas in your writing.
Note that analysis often leads to synthesis , an extension and more complicated form of analysis. See our synthesis page for more information.
Without analysis.
Embryonic stem cell research uses the stem cells from an embryo, causing much ethical debate in the scientific and political communities (Robinson, 2011). "Politicians don't know science" (James, 2010, p. 24). Academic discussion of both should continue (Robinson, 2011).
Embryonic stem cell research uses the stem cells from an embryo, causing much ethical debate in the scientific and political communities (Robinson, 2011). However, many politicians use the issue to stir up unnecessary emotion on both sides of the issues. James (2010) explained that "politicians don't know science," (p. 24) so scientists should not be listening to politics. Instead, Robinson (2011) suggested that academic discussion of both embryonic and adult stem cell research should continue in order for scientists to best utilize their resources while being mindful of ethical challenges.
Note that in the first example, the reader cannot know how the quotation fits into the paragraph. Also, note that the word both was unclear. In the revision, however, that the writer clearly (a) explained the quotations as well as the source material, (b) introduced the information sufficiently, and (c) integrated the ideas into the paragraph.
Trow (1939) measured the effects of emotional responses on learning and found that student memorization dropped greatly with the introduction of a clock. Errors increased even more when intellectual inferiority regarding grades became a factor (Trow, 1939). The group that was allowed to learn free of restrictions from grades and time limits performed better on all tasks (Trow, 1939).
In this example, the author has successfully paraphrased the key findings from a study. However, there is no conclusion being drawn about those findings. Readers have a difficult time processing the evidence without some sort of ending explanation, an answer to the question so what? So what about this study? Why does it even matter?
Trow (1939) measured the effects of emotional responses on learning and found that student memorization dropped greatly with the introduction of a clock. Errors increased even more when intellectual inferiority regarding grades became a factor (Trow, 1939). The group that was allowed to learn free of restrictions from grades and time limits performed better on all tasks (Trow, 1939). Therefore, negative learning environments and students' emotional reactions can indeed hinder achievement.
Here the meaning becomes clear. The study’s findings support the claim the reader is making: that school environment affects achievement.
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Now, we may be experts in best essay writing , but we’re also the first to admit that tackling essay questions can be, well, a bit of a challenge. Essays first require copious amounts of background reading and research so you can include accurate facts in your writing. You then have to figure out how to present those facts in a convincing and systematic argument. No mean feat.
But the silver lining here is that presenting your argument doesn’t have to be stressful. This goes even if you’re a new student without much experience and ability. To write a coherent and well-structured essay , you just have to really understand the requirements of the question. And to understand the requirements of the question, you need to have a good hold on all the different question words. For example, 'justify', 'examine', and 'discuss', to name a few.
Lacking this understanding is a pitfall many students tumble into. But our guide on essay question words below should keep you firmly above on safe, essay-acing ground.
No matter their nature, question words are key and must always be adhered to. And yet, many students often overlook them and therefore answer their essay questions incorrectly. You may be a font of all knowledge in your subject area, but if you misinterpret the question words in your essay title, your essay writing could be completely irrelevant and score poorly.
For example, if you are asked to compare the French and British upper houses of parliament, you won’t get many points by simply highlighting the differences between the two parliamentary systems.
So, what should you do? We advise you start by reading this guide – we’ve divided the question words either by ‘critical’ or ‘descriptive’ depending on their nature, which should help you identify the type of response your essay requires.
These are the question words we will cover in this blog:
Critical question words | Descriptive question words |
---|---|
Analyse | Define |
Evaluate | Demonstrate |
Justify | Describe |
Critically evaluate | Elaborate |
Review | Explain |
Assess | Explore |
Discuss | Identify |
Examine | Illustrate |
To what extent | Outline |
Summarise | |
Clarify | |
Compare | |
Contrast |
Once you have done this, it’s also important that you critically (more on this word later) examine each part. You need to use important debates and evidence to look in depth at the arguments for and against, as well as how the parts interconnect. What does the evidence suggest? Use it to adopt a stance in your essay, ensuring you don’t simply give a narration on the key debates in the literature. Make your position known and tie this to the literature.
It is essential to provide information on both sides of the debate using evidence from a wide range of academic sources. Then you must state your position basing your arguments on the evidence that informed you in arriving at your position.
Also, you may want to consider arguments that are contrary to your position before stating a conclusion to your arguments. This will help present a balanced argument and demonstrate wide knowledge of the literature. Here, a critical approach becomes crucial. You need to explain why other possible arguments are unsatisfactory as well as why your own particular argument is preferable.
The key to tackling these question words is providing ample evidence to support your claims. Ensure that your analysis is balanced by shedding light on, and presenting a critique of, alternative perspectives. It is also important that you present extensive evidence taken from a varying range of sources.
State your conclusion clearly and state the reasons for this conclusion, drawing on factors and evidence that informed your perspective. Also try to justify your position in order to present a convincing argument to the reader.
Put another way, ‘review’ questions entail offering your opinion on the validity of the essay question. For example, you may be asked to review the literature on electoral reform in Great Britain. You'll need to give an overview of the literature. and any major arguments or issues that arose from it. You then need to comment logically and analytically on this material. What do you agree or disagree with? What have other scholars said about the subject? Are there any views that contrast with yours? What evidence are you using to support your assessment? Don’t forget to state your position clearly.
Review answers should not be purely descriptive; they must demonstrate a high level of analytical skill. The aim is not simply to regurgitate the works of other scholars, but rather to critically analyse these works.
However, when assessing a particular argument or topic, it is important that your thoughts on its significance are made clear. This must be supported by evidence, and secondary sources in the literature are a great start. Essentially, you need to convince the reader about the strength of your argument, using research to back up your assessment of the topic is essential. Highlight any limitations to your argument and remember to mention any counterarguments to your position.
Give a detailed examination of the topic by including knowledge of the various perspectives put forward by other scholars in relation to it. What are your thoughts on the subject based on the general debates in the literature? Remember to clearly state your position based on all the evidence you present.
You should also try to provide some context on why the issues and facts that you have closely examined are important. Have these issues and facts been examined differently by other scholars? If so, make a note of this. How did they differ in their approach and what are the factors that account for these alternative approaches?
‘Examine’ questions are less exploratory and discursive than some other types of question. They focus instead on asking you to critically examine particular pieces of evidence or facts to inform your analysis.
Such questions require that you display the extent of your knowledge on a given subject and that you also adopt an analytical style in stating your position. This means that you must consider both sides of the argument, by present contrasting pieces of evidence. But ultimately, you must show why a particular set of evidence, or piece of information, is more valid for supporting your answer.
It is important that you provide more than one meaning if there are several of them as it shows that you are very familiar with the literature.
Make sure you assert your position with these types of questions. It's even more important that you support your arguments with valid evidence in order to establish a strong case.
‘Describe’ question words focus less on the basic meaning of something, therefore, and more on its particular characteristics. These characteristics should form the building blocks of your answer.
In addition, always remember to back any claims with academic research. In explanatory answers it is important that you demonstrate a clear understanding of a research topic or argument. This comes across most convincingly if you present a clear interpretation of the subject or argument to the reader. Keep in mind any ‘what’, ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions as this will help you to structure a clear and logically coherent response. Coherence is extremely important in providing explanatory answers.
A somewhat detached, dispassionate tone can be particularly effective, in contrast to the more assertive, argumentative tone you might adopt for other types of essay question. Just remember that the key objective here is to give a nuanced account of a research topic or argument by examining its composite parts.
8. illustrate, 10. summarise, 11. clarify.
Such questions require you to shed light on a topic or, in some instances, break down a complex subject into simple parts. Coherence is very important for acing such questions, remembering to present your answer in a systematic manner.
Furthermore, you may also want to emphasise any differences, although the focus of your essay should be on establishing similarities.
How to strategically structure essay based on question words.
Understanding how to structure an essay based on question words is crucial for producing clear, focused, and compelling academic writing. The question words we analised above guide the direction of your response and dictate the type of content required. Recognising the demands of each question word allows you to strategically organise your essay, ensuring that your arguments are relevant and comprehensive. By mastering this approach, you can enhance the clarity and impact of your writing, making your academic work more persuasive and effective.
Here are a few more handy tips to bear in mind when addressing your essay questions:
When you first get your essay question, always try to understand exactly what the question means and what it is asking you to do. Look at the question word(s) and think about their meaning before you launch into planning what to write. Hopefully, our guide has shown you how to do this expertly.
Remember to read the question several times and consider any underlying assumptions behind the question. Highlight the key words and if possible, make a very basic draft outline of your response. This outline does not have to be detailed. But if you follow it as you write, it will help keep your response coherent and systematic.
Finally, remember to read through your essay at the end to check for any inconsistencies and grammatical or spelling errors. Or, if you're in search of the perfect finishing touch, have a professional apply an edit to your final essay. It always helps to have a second set of fresh eyes to assess your work for any errors or omissions.
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With less than two months to go until Election Day, it is impossible to keep track of all the political madness afoot. So much bad behavior. So much weirdness. But for the remainder of this campaign season, I pledge to keep an extra close eye on things for you and, every Friday, spotlight a smattering of the week’s more colorful developments, including obscure bits you easily might have missed.
This week brought us some brutal MAGA-on-MAGA combat, compliments of Laura Loomer, the right-wing influencer who has been kicking it with Donald Trump on the campaign trail of late. Loomer started things off by snarking on X that if Kamala Harris wins the presidency, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Get it? Because Harris is half Indian.
The smear wasn’t clever or funny and, in fact, was so thuddingly racist it prompted a public scolding from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (yep, you read that right: Marjorie. Taylor. Greene), who denounced Loomer’s post as “ appalling and extremely racist ” and later told CNN that Loomer lacked “ the right mentality ” to advise a presidential campaign. Loomer responded by slamming Greene as the real racist — and, oh, yes, also “ gutter trash .”
But wait! There’s more. One of the Senate’s top Trump toadies, Lindsey Graham, also publicly warned his MAGA king against associating with the “toxic” Loomer, prompting Loomer to go hard at Graham, with an attack on the senator’s loyalty to Trump and on his sexual orientation.
I guess this is what happens when you build a political movement on the idea that nastiness and pugilism are signs of courage and integrity.
It looks as though Mayor Eric Adams of New York may have a Trumpian predilection for surrounding himself with questionable characters. Various aides have been swept into multiple federal investigations of possible corruption at City Hall and the Police Department. The mayor, a Democrat, has had his phone seized and his judgment questioned, since many of those under investigation were his direct appointees, including the police commissioner, who resigned on Thursday .
How is Adams responding to the gathering storm? By explaining to New Yorkers what’s going on or by vowing to clean up his administration? Don’t be silly. He is instead cloaking himself in the good book by comparing himself to Job , the biblical innocent whose suffering was imposed by God as part of a divine test.
“I wish I could tell you that I had one moment in my life that was a Job moment,” he said at an evangelical Black church in Brooklyn on Sunday. “But I did not have one. I had many.”
Lord, deliver us from this shameless posturing.
Just when you thought Trump’s migrants-munching-pets hullabaloo couldn’t get any more delicious, up pops Marianne Williamson, the erstwhile Democratic presidential hopeful, with this spiritually themed warning on X:
“Continuing to dump on Trump because of the ‘eating cats’ issue will create blowback on Nov. 5. Haitian voodoo is in fact real, and to dismiss the story out-of-hand rather than listen to the citizens of Springfield, Ohio confirms in the minds of many voters the stereotype of Democrats as smug elite jerks who think they’re too smart to listen to anyone outside their own silo.”
I’m just going to leave this here for you to unpack on your own.
Pamela Paul
Opinion Columnist
For those for whom the presidential election offers an obvious and decisive choice, there is nothing more baffling than undecided voters.
What could they possibly be waiting for?
Donald Trump has made it endlessly clear who he is. Those who count themselves as his fans somehow look at this whiny, wounded figure and see a tough guy and strongman who will stand up for people like them or at least someone who will serve their interests. As for JD Vance, the more he seems to explore who he is, the more he seems to alienate everyone else.
People who say they don’t know enough about Kamala Harris, on the other hand, have a point. Harris’s strategy is to stay vague, and it’s an astute one: It enables her to capture Never Trumpers, independents, moderates and liberals without alienating the progressive wing, third-party flirters and potential abstainers. This may frustrate those keen on more detail, but her campaign knows too well that every detail risks turning off potential voters.
Like many people in the broad Harris coalition, I am sure I will dislike some of Harris’s policy decisions and actions. That’s beside the point.
Or, as the conservative journalist David Frum put it on the “Bulwark” podcast last week, “That’s tomorrow’s problem.” Frum has his own reasons to foresee disagreement with a Harris administration. But, he explained, “today’s problem is you have to save the Constitution, save NATO, save trade, save American leadership in the world.”
It’s a simple point, but it offers a clarifying framework. For those who are still wavering, consider not only the stakes but also the timeline. If you are at all concerned about those larger issues, you can sweat the smaller ones later. Regardless of any disagreements — petty or significant, ideological or practical — you may have with her, Harris is an intelligent, capable and healthy individual who will be subject to ordinary checks and balances.
You might say that’s a low bar. But remember, that is the bar.
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Jesse Wegman
Editorial Board Member
Attorney General Merrick Garland gave an important and sadly necessary speech on Thursday, thanking the 115,000 employees of the Justice Department for their efforts and steeling them for the difficult months ahead.
The purpose of this pep talk was to defend against right-wing charges of politicized prosecutions and to warn of the dangers of assaulting federal law enforcement.
“Over the past three and a half years, there has been an escalation of attacks on the Justice Department’s career lawyers, agents and other personnel that go far beyond public scrutiny, criticism and legitimate and necessary oversight of our work,” Garland said, noting the “conspiracy theories, dangerous falsehoods, efforts to bully and intimidate career public servants by repeatedly and publicly singling them out and threats of actual violence.”
Those are all important points, and it’s a frightening reminder of where we are that he felt he had to make them at all. No previous attorney general has had to say these things, because no previous attorney general has been faced with a presidential nominee who has openly promised to politicize the Justice Department if elected (and who took clear steps in that direction when he was last in office).
That’s the fine line Garland has to walk. He conspicuously did not utter Donald Trump’s name on Thursday, no doubt out of respect for the department’s rule against getting involved in electoral politics, but the hard truth remains: Those conspiracy theories, the threats of violence, the undermining of law enforcement — they are inspired and even promoted by one man, a man who is the single biggest threat to independent justice and the rule of law in America.
And, unfortunately, a man whom Garland tried his best to ignore until it was too late.
“There is not one rule for friends and another for foes, one rule for the powerful and another for the powerless, one rule for the rich and another for the poor, one rule for Democrats and another for Republicans,” Garland said in his speech.
The right words, for sure, but not really true. By delaying any investigation or prosecution of Trump until almost two years after he became attorney general, Garland hamstrung Jack Smith, the dogged and beleaguered special counsel, leaving little time for the predictable unpredictabilities of two high-stakes prosecutions. Both were as solid as federal cases get, and now neither has any chance of being completed before the election, leaving voters without clear legal conclusions about Trump’s responsibility for the Jan. 6 riot and the highly classified documents he took from the White House.
In short, for Donald Trump there was, and always is, a separate rule. Contrary to the bogus complaints of “lawfare,” the Justice Department has treated Trump better, not worse, than everyone else. If Trump wins in November and orders Justice to drop the prosecutions against him, that will be a lasting tarnish of Garland’s legacy.
Farah Stockman
Editorial Board Member, reporting from Boston
To mark the 50th anniversary of court-ordered school desegregation in Boston on Thursday, a yellow school bus drove reporters and educators on a pilgrimage around the city to sites that played a key role in that notoriously divisive period in Boston’s civic life.
The tour went to City Hall, where a mob of busing opponents turned on Senator Ted Kennedy, shattering the windows of the building where he took refuge. It stopped at South Boston High School, where white parents threw stones and insults at Black children from Roxbury who were arriving for their first day of class. It made its way to Freedom House in Roxbury, where Black parents, educators and activists strategized about how to keep children safe and continue their struggle for more equitable education.
On the bus, Ira Jackson — chief of staff to Kevin White, who was mayor of Boston in those fateful days in 1974 — took the microphone and told the incredible story about how the mayor learned on the eve of that first day of school that Whitey Bulger, the notorious Irish American mobster, was planning to kill Black children on those buses. The city was already a tinderbox. An evil act like that would have set it ablaze.
Mayor White begged Washington for federal marshals, but President Gerald Ford refused. The mayor ended that night at the home of Whitey Bulger’s brother, William, a powerful politician at the time, warning him to dissuade his brother. City Hall then did what it could to beef up the police presence on the streets.
So while the nation watched in horror that day as a bastion of liberalism revealed its inner Selma, Ira Jackson called the mayor and reported the good news: Nobody had died.
But if you look back, no one benefited more from the chaos and disorder of those years than Whitey Bulger. Police officers lost their credibility, because they were enforcing an unpopular order. South Boston “became a no man’s land,” Jackson said. Amid the chaos and violence, white students dropped out of South Boston High in droves and never went back. Bulger recruited them to sell drugs.
That’s the irony: Bulger, who portrayed himself as protecting his white Irish community from dangerous Black people, proved to be his own people’s deadliest scourge, as Michael Patrick MacDonald points out in his memoir, “All Souls: A Family Story From Southie.”
Standing in the auditorium of South Boston High, MacDonald read from his book for the people on the bus tour and noted how much the people of South Boston and Roxbury had in common then, and now. They were poor and getting a substandard education. And today, they are priced out of the neighborhoods where they were born.
“What kills me is how easy it is to bring them together,” he told me, of his community organizing work. “When I am working with Black moms and white moms who have lost kids to incarceration or drugs, they see themselves in each other.”
Editorial Board Member, reporting from Charlotte, N.C.
Kamala Harris’s buoyant rally in Charlotte, N.C., on Thursday — her first rally since her successful trouncing of Donald Trump at their debate on Tuesday — was full of some of her most faithful supporters. But even here, several voters said they wanted to hear more details about what she intends to do in office.
“I’d like to see her talk a little more about immigration,” Terra Barnhill, 51, told me after the rally in this battleground state. “A lot of my friends who are on the fence are concerned about that,” Barnhill said.
Even fully decided voters still had questions about how Harris planned to make their lives better. Muriel Harley, 66, an accountant from Raleigh, said the rally had been thrilling.
“To me it was emotional, just as a Black woman,” Harley, 66, told me outside the Bojangles Coliseum afterward. Even so, Harley, who wore a shirt with an image of Harris as a child, said she had at least one issue in mind she hoped the candidate would directly address.
“She needs to talk about student loan forgiveness,” Harley said. “I went back to grad school,” she explained, shaking her head about the loan debt she faced.
Polls have consistently shown Trump with an edge among voters concerned about the economy, and that concern was reflected even among Democrats who told me they want to hear more from Harris about what can be done to help Americans grappling with the higher prices they’ve experienced under President Biden, especially at the grocery store.
At the rally, attended by more than 8,000 very excited supporters, Harris seemed to lean harder into those concerns. She reminded voters of her middle-class upbringing and said she wanted a country where “every American has an opportunity to own a home, to build wealth, to start a business.”
Harris also repeated her promise of a tax cut for small businesses. “I know they are the backbone of America’s economy,” she said.
But while Harris has said she would expand the child tax credit and give a tax break to small businesses, she has yet to offer many specifics on what she would do as president to lower prices. She did, however, bring up her plan to offer $25,000 in aid to first-time home buyers — a good idea that would provide direct relief to Americans (though it would certainly require building more housing, something Harris has said she would support).
Addressing the higher costs Americans are grappling with is thorny: The causes of these economic pressures are complex, and the president’s role in driving down costs is somewhat constrained. Harris will have to find a way to give Americans more specifics anyway. Doing so could be crucial to making sure voters don’t look for relief anywhere else.
David Wallace-Wells
A week ago, the much-hyped hurricane season was looking like a fascinating dud. Forecasters had projected an incredibly busy summer and fall, with many predicting the worst season in modern history. But after an early encounter with Hurricane Beryl, which made an unusual June landfall in Grenada as a Category 4 storm, there has been hardly any activity at all in the Atlantic basin, leading meteorologists and climate scientists alike to wonder what happened and why the terrifying-seeming season fizzled out so spectacularly.
The waters of the Atlantic remained astonishingly high, meaning that any storm to pass through the waters of the Caribbean or the Gulf of Mexico was likely to become a powerhouse. Nonetheless, weather patterns farther offshore seem to have shifted the geography of storm formation. Tropical cyclones were not appearing off the coast of Africa, where they typically begin their trip westward, but over the continent instead, producing pretty much unheard-of meteorological activity and delivering historic amounts of rainfall to the Sahara.
Hurricane Francine, which made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 2 on Wednesday, isn’t exactly a historic storm, though it has produced widespread flooding and power outages for hundreds of thousands all along the Gulf Coast. But as a sort of “tweener” weather event, it does illustrate several features of the new phase of climate history we are all now living through, having left behind the window of global temperatures that enclose all of human history — and all of our previous experiences of hurricanes.
First, even quiet seasons and unexceptional storms can generate an awful lot of damage and disruption. Some of that reflects the increasing level of valuable stuff we keep building blithely in harm’s way. But it also means that even relatively small increases in the actual intensity of extreme events can produce enormous increases in weather damage. Increasingly in the United States, “normal” seeming meteorological events are imposing costs in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars.
Second, though many people assume that warming will increase the number of hurricanes, in fact, climate science is much more confident that it will make a larger share of them high intensity storms (perhaps even necessitating the creation of new levels on the category scale).
And third, the behavior of individual storms is itself being changed by warming, which seems particularly effective at getting them to intensify much more rapidly (as Hurricane Otis did last year in Acapulco , Mexico, growing from a tropical storm to a Category 5 in barely one day). Warming can also make them slow down or even stall right at landfall, often producing more damage in a single place.
At the moment, Francine feels like a book end to a surprisingly quiet season, but there may well be more to come, given that roughly half of the season lies still ahead of us. In the further future, the pattern is even more forbidding, with one recent paper suggesting that without rapid emissions reductions, nearly three-quarters of the planet could experience unprecedented weather events over just the next 20 years.
Patrick Healy
Deputy Opinion Editor
Right-wing absurdities — Donald Trump’s comments about Haitian migrants eating pets, JD Vance’s comments about “childless cat ladies” (among other things), Project 2025’s ideas, the conspiracist Laura Loomer being in Trump’s inner circle — are breaking through to regular Americans and undecided voters to a degree that undermines the Trump campaign’s goal of positioning the former president as the more moderate, change-oriented candidate in the race. To me, this is the biggest political dynamic coming out of Tuesday’s debate.
On Wednesday night, I spent a couple of hours with our Times Opinion panel of 14 undecided young voters — a group we are talking to weekly this fall — and I asked them to tell me something they had changed their minds about since our first conversation in mid-August . Two of them quickly brought up how much they had soured on Vance. Another young person had heard about Fred Trump’s assertions about Donald Trump and disabled people and felt disgusted with the former president. While many of them still have reservations about Harris after Tuesday’s debate, they were more dismayed with Trump’s behavior and remarks. Some were disgusted by his false allegations about migrants eating pets in Ohio. Two others brought up the images of Loomer and Trump.
Mark, a 24-year-old chef from California who remains undecided in the race, reflected the sentiments of several in the group when he said of Trump:
He doesn’t necessarily scare me. I think he’s incompetent. What scares me is the people he’s surrounded himself with and how they can use him. Laura Loomer was on the plane with them. The Heritage Foundation and all the plans they have. It just seems like he’s a vessel for other people who are way more competent and have way more plans to do stuff that I personally don’t agree with. I feel like they’re going to use him and get policies enacted that I personally don’t agree with.
A lot of regular people are starting to tune into the presidential race. After the debate, when they looked on TikTok, they saw wacky, unsubstantiated comments about people eating cats on one side and an endorsement from Taylor Swift on the other. Trump and his campaign have tried to position him as the more moderate candidate who would change the economy for the better. Some polls indicate people see him that way. But the more the wacky stuff breaks through to regular people — and it is breaking through — the worse it will be for Trump.
He won in 2016 by being someone people felt they could take a chance on. Listening to our undecided young voters, I didn’t expect to hear such disgust over Vance, Loomer and Project 2025. That stuff is catching on. It’s not hard to imagine many Americans deciding in late October to take a chance on Harris (like they did in 2016 with Trump) rather than see a candidate they don’t like take the White House.
Paul Krugman
When Kamala Harris talks about economic policy, she talks a lot about the present and the future — about how we currently have low inflation and unemployment, and about things she will do to raise incomes and hold down prices. I’ve seen a number of commentators, however, saying that this isn’t enough, that she also needs to look back, to do more to defend the economic record of the administration in which she has been serving.
That’s a terrible idea. And I say that as someone who believes that the Biden administration did an excellent job coping with the aftermath of the pandemic. The trouble is that making the case for that record takes a fair bit of explaining. And as the old political saying goes, if you’re explaining, you’re losing.
Of course, this dictum applies to politicians, not policy wonks. So let me use two charts to do the explaining Harris shouldn’t, then talk about why none of this should be in her speeches.
First, here’s the evolution of prices and wages since just before the pandemic:
Why start there, rather than from the month Biden took office? Because economic numbers during the pandemic slump were deeply weird. Oil prices crashed, even going negative at one point; average wage data were distorted by the fact that many low-wage workers were laid off; and so on. So better to start in February 2020.
What you can see right away is that inflation surged in 2021-22 but that the surge was temporary: Over the past year consumer prices have risen only 2.5 percent, and even that number largely reflects a price nobody pays — “owners’ equivalent rent,” an estimate of what homeowners would be paying if they were renters. A measure that corresponds to the practice in many other countries, which don’t include that rent equivalent in their inflation numbers, is up only 1.3 percent over the past year.
Why did we have that temporary inflation surge? The best explanation is that it reflected pandemic-related disruptions. One strong piece of evidence for this proposition is that cumulative inflation since the beginning of the pandemic, using comparable measures, has been similar in many wealthy countries:
Still, prices are considerably higher than they were four and a half years ago. But going back to that first chart, so are wages, which for most workers have risen substantially more than prices.
This is, objectively, a pretty good story. We had a one-time jump in prices, which was probably unavoidable given the effects of the pandemic, or at any rate could have been avoided only at the cost of a severe recession; but inflation is back under control, and workers’ purchasing power is higher than ever.
But Americans in general are unhappy with the fact that things cost more than they used to and aren’t mollified by the fact that wages have gone up even more.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. It’s a longstanding result that everyday people don’t think about inflation the way economists do. At times when both prices and wages are rising, people tend to believe that higher prices are taking away their hard-earned wage gains, rather than seeing rising wages and rising prices as two sides of the same coin.
So should Harris be giving lectures on Econ 101, telling voters, “Look, you just don’t understand”? Any adviser suggesting such a thing should be fired on the spot.
No, leave it to people like me to argue that Biden was right to allow a temporary spike in inflation — no matter how big the avalanche of hate mail it inevitably produces. I don’t pretend to be an expert on political strategy, but everything I see says that on economics, Harris is right to focus on what can be, unburdened by what has been.
As the debate over the Debate rages a day later, it’s tempting to try to catalog all of the lies Donald Trump told to an audience of tens of millions of Americans. But more interesting than the fact of his lies is how he lies.
Take a look at the former president’s rambling answer on abortion and reproductive rights. Linsey Davis of ABC News corrected Trump when he claimed, falsely, that Democratic-led states allow “execution after birth.” But he followed that one up with another lie, more insidious and, in its way, more Trumpian.
“Every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative, they all wanted this issue to be brought back to the states where the people could vote,” he said.
Let’s stop right there. The first part — “every legal scholar,” whether liberal or conservative — is not only untrue but obviously so. Just look at the briefs filed at the Supreme Court in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade. You will find an overwhelming number of liberal scholars weighing in on the side of preserving the constitutional right to an abortion.
But as with so many of Trump’s lies, it is wrapped around a grain of truth. In this case, the grain is that some high-profile liberals once criticized Roe v. Wade. Famously, Ruth Bader Ginsburg did so before she became a Supreme Court justice, arguing that Roe was decided too quickly and too broadly.
Of course, anyone who listened to her reasoning would learn that she did not want Roe overturned. Rather she wanted it to be grounded more explicitly in the Constitution , on equal protection grounds, rather than on the right to privacy. In the 1970s, the liberal law professor John Hart Ely strongly denounced Roe , but by 2022, when Justice Samuel Alito quoted Ely in his decision overturning Roe, attitudes like that were near impossible to find on the left.
This was all part of the political and legal evolution of the debate over abortion rights, but Trump doesn’t do nuance. So he ignored the inconvenient parts of the story and never explained the nature of the objections to Roe. And he changed “some” scholars to “all,” as though through sheer maximalism — the biggest building, the smartest guy, the perfect phone call — he could lull voters into his simplistic, zero-sum view of the world.
It’s also worth noting that, contrary to Trump’s claim, I have yet to meet anyone who actually wants abortion to be decided on a state-by-state basis. Why would they? No matter where you stand on the issue, it involves profound matters of life and death, bodily autonomy and human equality. What abortion opponent is fine with a rule that lets unborn babies be killed in California but not in Kentucky? What abortion rights supporter is content with protecting women from forced birth in New York but not in Texas?
This is why we have a federal Constitution that is supreme over the states — it’s how we protect and defend the fundamental rights of all Americans, regardless of where they happen to live. One of those rights — which Americans continue to support by at least a 2-to-1 majority , even after Roe was struck down — is a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body.
Imagine you’re listening to a football game on the radio and the play-by-play guy says: “Patrick Mahomes takes the snap, throws … and that’s 71 yards gained over the last 12 plays!”
Ridiculous, right? But that’s exactly what journalists and economists do every month when the inflation numbers come out. Instead of saying what happened in the latest month — the latest “play” — we usually focus on what happened to prices over the past 12 months.
Can’t blame the government for this. The headline on the news release from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that came out on Wednesday was this: “ C.P.I. for All Items Rises 0.2% in August; Shelter Up .” That’s the one-month change in the Consumer Price Index. It’s the equivalent of telling people what happened on the latest play from the line of scrimmage.
But reports about that announcement said things like this: “Inflation fell in August to 2.5 percent, down from 2.9 percent in July.” Summing up the price change over the past 12 months through August is the equivalent of summing up the total yardage over the past 12 plays.
The justification for focusing on the price change over the past year is that the monthly numbers are volatile. Looking over an entire year smooths out those ups and downs.
The problem is that the fresh news gets swamped by stuff that happened in the past. If the Kansas City Chiefs happened to gain 98 yards on a kickoff runback a few plays ago, that will “inflate” the total yardage gained over the past 12 plays. Economists call that a base effect. As time goes on, the 98-yard gain will fall out of the 12-play total and suddenly yardage gained — like measured inflation — will abruptly fall.
I’m not against measuring the year-over-year change in prices, but I’d like to see more attention on the latest monthly change, which is really the only new thing. What did happen on that Mahomes pass play?
It wasn’t the biggest whopper of the night, but during the debate, Donald Trump — who refused to say that Ukraine should win its war — said some false things about the role our allies are playing. Again, let me give you the full statement, with no sanewashing :
“I want the war to stop. I want to save lives that are being uselessly — people being killed by the millions. It’s the millions. It’s so much worse than the numbers that you’re getting, which are fake numbers. Look, we’re in for $250 billion or more because they don’t ask Europe, which is a much bigger beneficiary to getting this thing done than we are. They’re in for $150 billion less because Biden and you don’t have the courage to ask Europe like I did with NATO. They paid billions and billions, hundreds of billions of dollars when I said either you pay up or we’re not going to protect you anymore. So that may be one of the reasons they don’t like me as much as they like weak people. But you take a look at what’s happening. We’re in for $250 to $275 billion. They’re into $100 to $150. They should be forced to equalize.”
I’m not sure why he thinks it necessary to claim that the casualty numbers are fake. But I do know that he loves to claim that our allies aren’t paying their share. Except that’s completely wrong. I wrote about this a few months ago : Europe is spending considerably more on Ukraine than we are:
It’s true that America, with its much bigger defense industry, is supplying most of the weapons. But we are not bearing most of the monetary burden.
For Trump, of course, the claim that Europe isn’t helping serves the purpose of portraying the Biden-Harris administration as weak. But it just isn’t true.
Kathleen Kingsbury
Opinion Editor
Even before Taylor Swift endorsed Kamala Harris, it was clearly the vice president’s night. In more than 90 minutes of contentious debate, Harris continued to prosecute the case against a second Donald Trump presidency more effectively than perhaps any of his other rivals has since 2015. But was it enough to satisfy those voters who say they still need to know more about her in order to cast a ballot in her favor this November?
Over the weekend, a survey by The New York Times and Siena College found that 60 percent of likely voters said they believed America was headed in the wrong direction, and many reported that they didn’t know enough about where Harris stands on several key issues. Any poll is just a snapshot in time, and it is admittedly hard to interpret exactly what those respondents are looking for from her. Do they want a better understanding of how she plans to govern from the Oval Office in terms of policy? Or are they more interested in her character and what type of leader she would be?
For those voters looking for answers on policy, the debate is unlikely to have left them feeling better informed. According to the Times tracker, the vice president spent nearly half of her speaking time attacking Trump. She rightfully called out his lies and his dangerous embrace of dictators. She was also strong in defending reproductive rights, as well as President Biden’s record on foreign and domestic policy. And she mentioned a handful of plans she’d pursue if she won the White House.
Yet we learned very few new details about those plans. On the economy, which voters often rank as the issue of most importance to them, she only scratched the surface in discussing how she’d enact tax cuts, build more affordable housing and help parents of young children. On foreign policy, she committed herself to a two-state solution in the Middle East and to supporting Ukraine in victory over Russia, but she didn’t expand on how she’d seek to achieve either goal. She pledged not to ban fracking but said little on how she would plan to invest in climate solutions. She also continued to dodge questions about why she recently distanced herself from positions that she took in her quest to be the Democratic nominee in 2020.
Most important, she did very little to distinguish her plans from Biden’s in an election in which the electorate seems hungry for change.
To be clear, Trump utterly failed to present or defend his policy goals. In many ways, the former president confirmed what has been obvious for years: His main aim, should he win another term, would be to do whatever is best for Donald Trump. He is not fit to serve .
But on a night when Harris set traps every which way for Trump (and he took the bait essentially every time), the one moment those tables were turned was when the former president asked her what she would do differently from the past three and a half years. Some voters may still be left looking for that answer.
Jessica Bennett
Contributing Opinion Editor
She didn’t shout. She didn’t interrupt. She didn’t complain about having less time to speak .
But “she” — she being Kamala Harris, to use Donald Trump’s preferred name for her — managed to undermine him, provoking him into shouting, finger-pointing and sputtering, ranting about eating dogs and nuclear weapons with sweat on his upper lip. She remained calm and collected, emasculating him one subtle jab at a time.
I came into the debate prepared to watch for the subtleties of Trump’s sexism . He wouldn’t look at her. He refused to speak her name. He kept referring to “her boss”(President Biden), diminishing her power. But by the end of the debate, I was tallying the ways that Harris had done the reverse: picking at his brittle ego, cracking the fragile facade of his blustering machismo.
She dismissed the size of his rallies. She mocked his “love letters to Kim Jong-un.” She called him “weak,” referred to him as “this fella” and said Vladimir Putin would “eat you for lunch.” She talked about his multiple bankruptcies (code for him failing as a man and a provider) and noted that he had been “fired by 81 million people” and was clearly “having a hard time processing that,” like a gentle mother, patting her tantruming child on the head.
And she managed to do it without being shrill or angry or coming off as petty. Worst of all, she laughed at him. It wasn’t a forced or controlled or premeditated laugh. It was a real laugh. A big laugh. The sort of laugh she couldn’t hold in and made those of us watching laugh along with her.
“Talk about extreme,” she said, as he stared dead-eyed into the distance. She immediately hammered home all of the former generals and advisers who had declared him unfit for office. He could only fidget uncomfortably in response.
Eight years ago, the same man, perhaps less sleepy but no less angry, hulked over Hillary Clinton as she tried to ignore him and keep speaking. Now the woman running for this country’s highest office was no longer turning the other cheek. Instead, she laid bare the smallness of Trump’s manhood and asserted her own power, competence and confidence in the face of it. In the end, only a woman could do that for us.
David Firestone
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
For the first 10 minutes or so of Tuesday night’s debate, it looked as though the restrained version of Donald Trump might have shown up in Philadelphia, the one who learned his lesson from his failure to curb his impulses in the 2020 debates with Joe Biden. He stayed silent while Kamala Harris ripped up his economic plan, which she correctly noted was based on a tax cut for the wealthy and a sales tax on all imported goods. When it was his turn to respond, he accurately pointed out that the Biden administration had made no attempt to end the tariffs he imposed on China.
But it didn’t last, and no one who has watched Trump over the past decade thought it could. Within minutes, he descended from a discussion of tariffs into a description of immigrants — one he returned to over and over again during the evening — that could only be described as a form of nativist hysteria.
“They are taking over the towns,” he said. “They’re taking over buildings. They’re going in violently. These are the people that she and Biden let into our country. And they’re destroying our country. They are dangerous. They’re at the highest level of criminality, and we have to get them out. We have to get them out fast.”
This was the level of delusion that Harris and her campaign had clearly hoped Trump would demonstrate to voters, and it just got worse from there. “They’re eating the dogs,” he said, referring to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio — a particularly heinous calumny that began on social media and was spread by his running mate, JD Vance. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating — they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” When the moderator David Muir pointed out that local officials had seen nothing of the kind, Trump said he heard about it on television.
Throughout the evening, in moments just like that, Harris was able to do something that Biden had failed to do when he was campaigning for re-election: push Trump in ways that exposed his spattering of lies and wild fantasies.
This was even true about the frightening attempt on Trump’s life. There has been no evidence that it was politically motivated, but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming it was. “I probably took a bullet to the head because of the things that they say about me,” he said, referring to his false claim that the indictments against him were evidence of “weaponizing” the justice system.
And asked about his role in undermining the democratic process, he said it was actually Harris who had done so, by usurping Biden’s role atop the ticket. “You talk about a threat to democracy — he got 14 million votes, and they threw him out of office. And you know what? I’ll give you a little secret. He hates her. He can’t stand her. But he got 14 million votes. They threw him out. She got zero votes.”
The debate was an unqualified success for Harris not just because she was able to define herself and her plans but also because she was able to push a few buttons and let Trump show off his truest self.
When running for office after taking away the reproductive freedoms of roughly half the American public, the best thing to do may simply be to lie about what you have done.
That was the political calculus made by Donald Trump during Tuesday night’s debate. His bald and outrageous lies about abortion and his role in overturning Roe v. Wade were fantastical, even for him. There’s lying, and then there’s the world of fairy tales, and he chose the latter.
Trump said Roe v. Wade had “torn our country apart” and that “every legal scholar, every Democrat, every Republican, liberal, conservative” wanted the issue to be sent back to the states.
This is a lie. A majority of Americans supported the protections for abortion under Roe and still do.
He accused Democrats of supporting killing babies. “In other words, we’ll execute the baby,” he said. This is another lie, and one of the ABC News moderators, Linsey Davis, called him on it. He accused Harris’s running mate, Gov. Tim Walz, of saying “execution after birth” is “absolutely fine.” This, too, is a lie.
Trump misled those who were watching the debate, saying he believes in “exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.” Yet it is thanks to Trump that states have been able to enact abortion bans that include no such exceptions.
Vice President Kamala Harris, rightly, pointed out that a majority of Americans believe in a woman’s right to make decisions about her own body and pointed out the pain that has been caused so many women in Republican-led states since the Supreme Court’s decision.
Abortion bans are a losing issue for Republicans, and Trump did nothing to change that.
Within the first half-hour of the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, I heard from four veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to Harris: a strong and confident performance that often put Trump on the defensive, with the potential to win the face-off as he sputtered over abortion rights and students loans.
Harris went on offense from the start, as she strode across the stage to Trump’s podium and reached out, shook his hand and introduced herself. Her performance was — in pretty much every way — a total contrast to President Biden’s in the June debate, and if Trump had a playbook to win the debate, it wasn’t clear as he scrambled to fight back against her attacks over the economy, tariffs, in vitro fertilization and China.
Trump’s go-to line — “another lie” — probably pleased many in his MAGA base, but I’m skeptical it was persuasive for many undecided and swing voters. That’s because a lot of those voters have told The Times that they are tired of Trump’s complaining when they want to hear specifics about what he would do in office.
Time and again, Harris laid the bait, and Trump took it. “People start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom,” Harris said at one point. When the ABC moderators tried to ask Trump about immigration, he said, “First let me respond to the rallies.” But Harris also found ways to send Trump off on tangents, like when he pushed the lie that migrants in Ohio are killing pets for food. The moderators fact-checked him, but he wouldn’t let it go. And then Harris lowered the boom.
“Talk about extreme,” she said, laughing.
The Democratic strategists were struck by how much Harris owned Trump, who raised his voice more and more as the debate unfolded. They saw her as strong but likable and substantive on the issues. As for Republicans, one Trump ally argued that the former president spoke with confidence and strength and that many voters would still be unforgiving of Harris over the Biden-era economy.
The first 20 to 25 minutes of a debate are often the most important part: America is a country with a short attention span where first impressions count, where politicians try to set the tone and tempo of a debate from the start, and you can often tell quickly if someone will have an off night. Trump is often at his most disciplined (relatively speaking) at the start of a debate; as time goes on, he tends to meander in his answers and get snappish.
In this case, though, whatever discipline Trump had fell away pretty quickly in the face of a Harris onslaught. If she came under pressure, it was from the ABC moderators who pressed her on her changes in policy positions like on fracking. But I’m skeptical that the pressure from a moderator’s question will break through to voters like the pressure that Harris subjected Trump to on abortion and his proposed tax cuts for the wealthy.
Donald Trump took time out from his pre-debate “ policy time ” on Tuesday to stick his out-of-joint nose into Congress’s fight over funding the government:
“If Republicans in the House, and Senate, don’t get absolute assurances on Election Security, THEY SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD WITH A CONTINUING RESOLUTION ON THE BUDGET,” he raved on Truth Social . “THE DEMOCRATS ARE TRYING TO ‘STUFF’ VOTER REGISTRATIONS WITH ILLEGAL ALIENS. DON’T LET IT HAPPEN — CLOSE IT DOWN!!!”
Such feistiness! Love to see it. Especially since the former president must know, or at least suspect, that he is spitting into the wind — shrieking at his minions to go hard on a poison-pill measure that has less chance of becoming law this season than JD Vance has of winding up the new V.P. of the Cat Fanciers’ Association . (The poison pill is a measure to require proof of citizenship to vote, even though the law already forbids noncitizens from voting, and Republicans have never shown any evidence that this is a problem.)
Then again, it’s not totally unreasonable for Trump to expect Republican lawmakers to blindly do his bidding. I mean, earlier this year, they tanked a serious bipartisan bill on what is ostensibly one of the party’s top priorities — border security — because Trump told them that doing so was in his electoral interests. Why not then force a government shutdown in pursuit of a measure that would cast further doubt on the integrity of our election system?
I’ll tell you why not. Because a government shutdown in the final stretch of a tick-tight, high-stakes election cycle would be political madness — especially if it looked as though the shutdown occurred not because of substantive disagreements over spending but because Trump was bullying his congressional team into indulging his delusions about election fraud. Again.
MAGA die-hards might be jazzed. The rest of the electorate, not so much.
Republican lawmakers may be loath to upset their nominee, but they value nothing above their own political fortunes. Most of them aren’t stupid enough to sign up for this kind of self-immolation.
Alicia P.Q. Wittmeyer and Rachel Louise Snyder
Alicia Wittmeyer, Opinion Special Projects Editor: You’ve written about domestic violence for years. For your latest essay , how did you end up focusing on the legal consequences for women who kill their abusers?
Rachel Louise Snyder, Contributing Opinion Writer: When I was writing my book “ No Visible Bruises ” I heard over and over how we didn’t know the number of women who were in prison for killing someone who was abusing them. I found this startling; this seemed like such a basic statistic. After I spoke about this at Stanford Law School in 2020, the executive directors of the Criminal Justice Center — Debbie Mukamal and David Sklansky — pushed for a large-scale survey of women in prison for homicide, which became the basis for the piece.
Wittmeyer: What was it like being in a prison as a proctor instead of a journalist?
Snyder: It was so humbling. Debbie made me go through training about not harming people while you’re talking with them and, honestly, I think it’s forever changed the way I interact with people. For example, when I do these incredibly intense interviews now, I never get off the phone with someone without asking what their plan is to take care of themselves. Will they call a friend? Go to church?
Doing this in person mattered. Formerly incarcerated women who were our consultants said that inmates get surveyed ad nauseam, especially through the mail: all these faceless, nameless people asking for the worst moment of their lives. Stanford ensured that clergy and/or a social worker was available on survey days so that the women would have some emotional support.
Wittmeyer: I know the researchers hope to eventually expand their survey to every state in the country. Ambitious, important — daunting! Any sense of the states that might be next on their list?
Snyder: To some extent, it depends on where we get permission — getting permission to do in-person research is a whole complicated process that, in our case, took nearly two years (in part, because of Covid).
California, Florida and Texas contain a huge percentage of the women who are incarcerated for homicide nationwide. But Texas is complicated because its facilities are smaller, and a survey would require visiting more of them, so just logistically it’s difficult. There are states with certain laws that make them potentially interesting to us, like Oklahoma and Illinois, for example. But it costs money to do this kind of research, and no one wants to fund it, honestly.
As a society, we don’t like messy victims. The anti-domestic violence advocacy world prioritized resources for victims who don’t get convicted of committing crimes. Incarcerated women simply don’t have a ton of people on the outside really advocating for them among potential donors. So, in part, the next state will depend on who is willing to fund this research.
Jamelle Bouie
Attracted by job opportunities around Springfield, Ohio, thousands of Haitian immigrants have migrated to the area in search of a better life. And while there have been real tensions — especially after a recent arrival caused a school bus crash that killed one child and injured 23 others — it is also true that the new Haitian community has revitalized a town that was on the path to terminal decline.
For every problem — the migrants have overwhelmed key city services — there are also opportunities for both newcomers and longtime residents. As my newsroom colleague Miriam Jordan detailed in a recent article, Springfield is a microcosm for all that is good, and difficult, about immigration.
Part of this story is a furious backlash. Some of it is ordinary and even understandable resentment, and some of it emanates from the ugliest corners of American life. Last month, for example, an armed neo-Nazi group marched through Springfield denouncing Haitian immigrants in a display reminiscent of the deadly “ Unite the Right ” riot in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017.
A responsible leader would use the situation in Springfield — the anger and acrimony from some, as well as the decency and generosity from others — as an opportunity to try to bring people together and come, as much as possible, to a mutual understanding. A leader would see it as a chance to do democracy, to bring people together as equals so that they can figure out how to live together.
Senator JD Vance of Ohio is not that responsible leader.
Faced with troubles and tensions that could, under the wrong circumstances, escalate into outright violence, Vance fanned the flames.
In July, during a Senate committee hearing, Vance referred to Springfield as an example of how “high illegal immigration levels under the Biden administration” have raised housing costs, a highly contested assertion that rests on the false claim that the new Haitian residents of Springfield are undocumented. (The vast majority have legal residency under the Temporary Protected Status program.)
On Monday, Vance shared the outrageously false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield were abducting and eating their neighbor’s pets. “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn’t be in this country,” wrote Vance on X . “Where is our border czar?”
Vance was amplifying a lie that has its origins in a viral, and entirely fabricated, social media post spread by a Malaysia-based right-wing influencer . Springfield authorities say there are “no credible reports or specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.” The Trump campaign has not provided evidence to support the claim.
On Tuesday, Vance conceded that the smears may “turn out to be false” but urged his followers to continue spreading the lie.
Vance entered the political scene as a literary wunderkind of sorts. In highlighting this claim and spreading it to his followers on social media, he has shown that these days, he’s little more than a petty demagogue — the junior partner to another, even pettier demagogue.
The charge that a foreign people steal and eat pets is a classic attack meant to dehumanize its targets and legitimize persecution and removal. This is important to note because it comes just days after Donald Trump warned that the mass expulsion of immigrants from the United States — the centerpiece of his second-term agenda — will be a “ bloody story .”
JD Vance, it seems, is playing his part.
In 20 years of covering presidential politics, I never saw a run of buoyant campaign rallies, boffo fund-raising, ecstatic social media and rank-and-file rapture for a candidate like Kamala Harris had in July and August, capped off by her Democratic convention speech. The next day, I sounded a note of caution about how joy is not a strategy , an argument that some readers disagreed with and some colleagues saw differently .
But a week after her speech, on Aug. 29, Harris faced her first real test — and, I’ve come to conclude, she fumbled it badly.
Her appearance that night on CNN — her first and only major interview since President Biden dropped out — was a missed opportunity: Harris gave canned or vague answers about why she had changed big positions from her 2020 campaign, she didn’t explain persuasively how she would lower the cost of living, and she responded blandly about what she would do on Day 1 as president. But most of all, I think, she didn’t leave strong positive impressions on undecided voters and lukewarm independents and Democrats.
The CNN interview looms large for me in part because Harris is running against a man who is unfit for office , who did enormous damage to the nation as president, who frequently veers into incoherence and lies in his news conferences and interviews — and yet who, for all that , is tied with Harris in leading polls .
Something seems to have happened in the past couple of weeks. As my newsroom colleague Nate Cohn wrote on Sunday: “Is Kamala Harris’s surge beginning to ebb?” CNN was one interview, not a trend, but I think it was revealing that a joy-driven campaign takes you only so far.
I checked in recently with our Times Opinion panel of young, undecided voters, which we are tracking through Election Day. Most in this group of 14 voters praised Harris’s convention speech; five said it made them more likely to vote for her . By contrast, seven said her answers on CNN made them less likely to vote for her.
“Harris did a poor job of explaining how she would ease inflation,” said Laura, a 20-year-old legal intern in Maryland, who was one of those less likely to support Harris after the interview. Lillian, a 27-year-old Virginian who gave Harris strong marks for her convention speech, could not come up with one positive takeaway from the interview.
For most in our group, Tuesday’s debate is critical in choosing a candidate. They want a better handle on who she is; they want stronger answers that build trust in her.
Big tent-pole events have an outsize impact in a tight race. The debate is one of Harris’s best chances to win over the doubters and undecideds and energize her momentum against Trump. No debate has ever felt more important.
Jeneen Interlandi
Tim Ballard, the former Homeland Security agent who started a global anti-sex-trafficking nonprofit group that became the subject of a hit movie and made him an international superhero, is facing extremely credible charges of sexual predation and assault. His entire apparatus — Operation Underground Railroad, which claimed to conduct undercover rescue operations across the world — appears to be a grim ruse designed only to help Ballard (and possibly others) get access to and abuse women and children.
The charges, laid out in a searing New York Times investigation by Mike Baker on Monday, are as horrific as they are heartbreaking: Not only did the operation not rescue anyone, but by using loads of money to entice possible traffickers, Ballard’s scam actually helped create a market for more trafficking than might otherwise have occurred.
The revelations make Operation Underground Railroad just one more in a long roster of false heroes and false narratives to populate the national sex trafficking discourse. The sheer volume of such stories — from Somaly Mam to Pizzagate — make it tempting to assume that the entire issue is a mere boogeyman, that sex trafficking really happens only in the heads of QAnon’s most fervent loyalists.
But that would be a mistake.
Here’s a true story: By the time he was caught by a cross-border task force this past April, a Florida pharmacist, Stefan Andres Correa , had traveled to Medellín, Colombia, 45 times in two years — to rape girls as young as 9. He paid a sex trafficker $75 to procure the children and according to court records offered $75 extra plus an iPhone to at least one of the girls “if she behaved.” The case captured headlines in the United States and Colombia for its egregiousness, but officials in both countries say that it was not an anomaly.
As The Wall Street Journal has reported , the rise of work-anywhere digital nomads triggered by the pandemic and the growing perception of Medellín as a city that is finally safe for tourists have conspired to touch off a boom in child sex trafficking. The operation that led to Correa’s arrest turned up perpetrators from Florida to Ohio as well as some 250 underage victims, fewer than 100 of whom have been found and brought to safety so far.
The investigators working to track down the rest are up against dozens of crime syndicates — including an offshoot of the original Medellín cartel — and a slew of modern tools (Airbnb, digital encryption, cryptocurrency) that have made traffickers exceedingly difficult to apprehend.
They are also up against a profound blind spot. Encouraged by exploitative politicians like Donald Trump, Americans routinely work themselves up into a frenzy over the moral character of people entering their country. (Murderers! Sex traffickers! Bad hombres!) They pay considerably less attention to the havoc their countrymen bring to other nations when they leave here.
This is never more true than during election season. In the coming weeks, as anti-immigration rhetoric reaches its familiar fever pitch, voters and politicians alike will wring their hands anew over the type and number of people seeking to penetrate the United States’ southern border. They should bear in mind that an untold number of American men are flocking in the opposite direction, to commit exactly the kind of heinous acts they are most terrified of.
Editorial Board Member, reporting from Raleigh, N.C.
On the campaign trail here in Raleigh, N.C., Gwen Walz and Doug Emhoff turned on the charm on Monday afternoon.
Walz, in a peppy Midwestern lilt, encouraged Democrats to bake cookies for the volunteers at the phone bank for her husband, Tim Walz, and Kamala Harris. “We need treats!” she said. “And the next night, go in and make the calls yourself.”
Emhoff, the second gentleman, joked that he and Harris had resorted to going for a walk on the tarmac recently to try to spend some quality time together. “Aw,” several women cooed at the event, in Raleigh’s City Market.
The crowd of some 200 Democrats — largely women — received Gwen Walz and Emhoff warmly. But many of them were also in a fighting kind of mood.
“Meow!” one woman cried out at the mention of JD Vance, a reference to his whining that “childless cat ladies” were running America. The Democrats inside the City Market roared, and their strong feelings were no surprise.
A day earlier, a secret audio tape was made public in which Mark Robinson, North Carolina’s Republican candidate for governor, vowed to ban abortions. They are already banned after 12 weeks in the state, thanks to the Republican supermajority that controls the General Assembly.
If only Americans considering staying home on Election Day could talk to North Carolina voters, whose lives have already been significantly affected by Trumpism.
Many Democrats here said they come from communities — and sometimes even families — in which they are far outnumbered by Republicans. “My ex-husband is voting for Trump,” Michelle Miles, 49, told me. “He’s always been controlling.”
Andrea Woodin, the secretary of the Franklin County Democrats, said she and her son, who is transgender, faced social ostracism for expressing their political views publicly.
“People yell at me from across the street,” Woodin said, adding that she home-schools her son for his safety.
In Southern battleground states like North Carolina, being a Democrat — or even just a woman — can take fortitude.
Thomas L. Friedman
“Joe and I got a lot of things right, but we got some things wrong, too — and here is what I have learned.”
For my money, uttering those 23 words, or something like them, is the key for Kamala Harris to win Tuesday’s debate against Donald Trump — and the election.
Utter them, and she will hugely improve her chances to win more of the undecided voters in this tight race. Fail to utter them or continue to disguise her policy shifts with the incoherent statement she used in the CNN interview — that while her positions might have changed on fracking and immigration, “ my values have not changed ” — and she will struggle.
Madam V.P., if you say your positions have changed but your values haven’t, what does that even mean? And what should we expect from your presidency — your values or your actions? Our latest poll shows too many voters still don’t know.
It’s OK to say: “I learned a lot as vice president. I’m proud of our record of putting America on a sustainable path to a clean energy future. It will make us more secure and more prosperous. But I also see that we can’t get there overnight. For reasons of both economic security and national security, we need an all-of-the-above energy strategy right now. So you can trust that in a Harris presidency, America will continue to lead the world in exploiting our oil and gas advantages but we will do it in the cleanest way possible while making the transition as fast as possible.”
It’s OK to say: “President Biden and I inherited a cruel Trump border policy that included separating parents from their children. Maybe, out of an excess of compassion, we rolled it back too far. But we learned from it — we learned that only comprehensive, bipartisan immigration reform can give us the solution we need, controlling illegal immigration — while continuing to be a beacon for legal immigration. So our administration sat down with one of the most conservative Republicans in the Senate, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and hammered out a bipartisan immigration bill that would have done just that. And what did Trump do? He ordered Republicans to kill it, so he could keep exploiting immigration as a wedge issue. And you’re asking me if I’ve flip-flopped?”
Politicians always underestimate how much voters (and the news media) respect a leader who can say, “We didn’t get this quite right the first time, and I’m going to fix it” — something Trump can never, ever do. As James Carville recently put it in a Times Opinion guest essay, “A leader who can openly admit a change in her understanding would feel like a breath of spring air for a lot of voters.”
Katherine Miller
Opinion Writer and Editor
Every Monday morning on The Point, we start the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
It’s debate week. Presidential debates are sometimes explosive and shape the terrain of elections (like the one in June, or that first Biden-Trump debate in 2020). And sometimes they are intense, but except for a single moment that becomes a shorthand for a candidate’s appeal or limitations, they fade quickly from memory. Tuesday night’s debate may be the only one between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, who will meet for the first time. Will it change or harden how people view one or both of them, or will we be back where we began again this time next week?
As much as Harris’s newness and questions about her have shaped the last month, in the last week, Trump has called a news conference to revisit years-old sexual misconduct allegations against him and attack the women who lodged them, and posted at length about arresting various people if 2024 is like 2020, when he lost. That’s how Trump is, but is that how he’s going to be on the debate stage? More subdued, as he was in June, or more aggressive, as he was in 2020?
Last week, Trump’s meandering answer to a question about child-care costs wasn’t the first time he’s been asked about that in a public setting — he was basically asked the same question at the June debate and replied about something unrelated. The first debate ended up being consumed by President Biden’s awful performance and questions about his presidency, and voters’ expectations of Trump can seem fairly baked in, but not always. How he is on Tuesday could also shape the next few weeks in big ways.
On Sunday, the latest Times/Siena poll hit and, with Harris down a couple of points, there’s been some nervousness about choices her campaign has made in substance and strategy, though it’s hard to know anything certain in a race this close. On Tuesday, one of the more complex things she has to deal with is Biden’s presidency, which has often not been popular, but from which she hasn’t distanced herself too much, and can’t significantly do so anyway, since she’s a part of it.
Theoretically, the debate will force the issue a little bit, since debates tend to deal with the economic and foreign policy issues of the moment. But it’s often hard to know whether voters are looking for specific policies or a sense of command. Sounding decisive and clear about why she’s making decisions a certain way might be just as important on a debate stage as how she approaches some policy issues or broader questions.
After the debate, Harris will attend the 9/11 memorial in New York on Wednesday, and Trump may as well; Harris will spend the rest of the week in the battleground states. But even though Trump’s public persona can overwhelm everything, by the end of Tuesday night, there really might be a clear contrast between them on subjects like the courts, gun control, artificial intelligence and NATO.
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2 Research your topic. Once you know your topic, you can begin collecting data and evidence to discuss it. If your analytical essay is about a creative work, you may want to spend time reviewing or evaluating that work, such as watching a film closely or studying the details of a painting.
Step 3: Write Topic Sentences. After you have your thesis statement about the benefits and drawbacks of remote work, you need to come up with topic sentences for each paragraph while writing an analytical essay. These sentences introduce the main point of each paragraph and help to structure your essay.
Visual Analysis Essays: These essays analyze visual art, such as paintings or sculptures, and explore how the artwork's elements work together to create meaning. Historical Analysis Essays: ... Take notes: As you read the essay, take notes on key points, quotes, and examples. This will help you to organize your thoughts and identify patterns in ...
Each body paragraph should have 1) a topic sentence, 2) an analysis of some part of the text and 3) evidence from the text that supports your analysis and your thesis statement. A topic sentence tells the reader what the body paragraph will be about. The analysis of the text is where you make your argument.
All analytical papers include a thesis, analysis of the topic, and evidence to support that analysis. When developing an analytical essay outline and writing your essay, follow these five steps: #1: Choose a topic. #2: Write your thesis. #3: Decide on your main points. #4: Gather evidence to support your analysis.
1. Restate the thesis statement: The conclusion should restate the thesis statement in a new and meaningful way, emphasizing its importance and relevance to the topic. 2. Summarize the main points: Summarize the main points of the essay, highlighting the evidence and examples that support the thesis statement. 3.
The first is the reading process. The purpose of a critical analysis assignment is to demonstrate an understanding of your subject matter. This means you carefully read, watch, or otherwise study your source text. The second part is the writing process itself. Below are nine organizational and writing tips to help you craft the best possible ...
The analysis in the body and its relation to the thesis is summed up. No new points are introduced, but a comment on the implications of the analysis is included at the end. Example of an Analytical Essay. This essay on Operation Anaconda is an example of an analytical essay. Introduction:
To make it impressive, mention the main theme of the essay briefly. 3. Write Analytical Essay Body Paragraphs. The body of any essay is the main part that consists of the flesh of the essay. Writing an analytical essay, the number of body paragraphs varies, depending upon the complexity of the topic.
First, select the best ideas for your essay. Then, emphasize the problems with works written by other researchers. Finally, write your analytical essay outline to demonstrate what approach you want to take. Examine the context and find examples to illustrate the scope of the issue.
Strategies for Essay Writing Table of Contents Tips for Reading an Assignment Prompt . . . . . 2-4 ... You may be asked to put new ideas in context, to analyze course texts, or to do research on something related to the course. Even if the instructor has introduced the assignment in class, make sure to read the ...
Use the body paragraphs of your report to present evidence that supports your thesis. A reliable pattern to keep in mind for developing the body paragraphs of a report is point, evidence, and analysis: The point is the central idea of the paragraph, usually given in a topic sentence stated in your own words at or toward the beginning of the ...
2. Create an outline for your analysis. Building on your thesis and the arguments you sketched out while doing your close read of the document, create a brief outline. Make sure to include the main arguments you would like to make as well as the evidence you will use to support each argument.
Break down each contributing factor and think about how it contributes to the overall point you are trying to prove. Do this in a draft form at first, think about all your contributing elements and then think how you may be able to analyse them in a way that flows nicely together and forms natural links. Marks are often lost when ideas jump ...
However, analytical essays differ from other essays because the writer must go further. They require the writer to interpret and analyze a given text or information using evidence to support their central idea or thesis statement. This analysis takes place in analytical paragraphs, or body paragraphs, if you are writing an analytical essay.
The basic structure of an essay always consists of an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. But for many students, the most difficult part of structuring an essay is deciding how to organize information within the body. This article provides useful templates and tips to help you outline your essay, make decisions about your structure, and ...
In addition to analyzing the author's point of view, it is also key to examine the author's purpose. Here are some tips to help you figure out the author's purpose: Check the Type of Text: Look at what kind of text it is. Is it a story, a news article, or maybe an essay? This can give you clues about why the author wrote it.
To be critical, or to critique, means to evaluate. Therefore, to write critically in an academic analysis means to: judge the quality, significance or worth of the theories, concepts, viewpoints, methodologies, and research results. evaluate in a fair and balanced manner. avoid extreme or emotional language. You evaluate or judge the quality ...
Analysis is a central writing skill in academic writing. Essentially, analysis is what writers do with evidence to make meaning of it. While there are specific disciplinary types of analysis (e.g., rhetorical, discourse, close reading, etc.), most analysis involves zooming into evidence to understand how the specific parts work and how their specific function might relate to a larger whole.
Table of contents. Step 1: Reading the text and identifying literary devices. Step 2: Coming up with a thesis. Step 3: Writing a title and introduction. Step 4: Writing the body of the essay. Step 5: Writing a conclusion. Other interesting articles.
Written by MasterClass. Last updated: Jun 7, 2021 • 3 min read. Analytical essays provide a way to share your insights about a work of literature, scientific study, or historical event. Explore. Articles. Sitemap. Gifts. About. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
Beyond introducing and integrating your paraphrases and quotations, you also need to analyze the evidence in your paragraphs. Analysis is your opportunity to contextualize and explain the evidence for your reader. Your analysis might tell the reader why the evidence is important, what it means, or how it connects to other ideas in your writing.
Definition of Question Words with Examples. Words such as 'explain', 'evaluate' or 'analyse' - typical question words used in essay titles - provide a useful indication of how your essay should be structured. They often require varying degrees of critical responses. Sometimes, they may simply require a descriptive answer.
A week ago, the much-hyped hurricane season was looking like a fascinating dud. Forecasters had projected an incredibly busy summer and fall, with many predicting the worst season in modern history.