The Claims assignment is complex. I’ve been helping your classmates with it since I assigned it, so I won’t be surprised if you’re not quite sure how to go about it.

Here’s how I explained the project to one of your classmates

These are the first sentences of your section:

Meanwhile people like James Peterson, husband of Kateri of the Olive Garden breakdown, are signing up for experiments. James was so anxious and so suicidal that he couldn’t even muster the self-preservation to get into inpatient treatment.

As you will remember from class, claims can hide in very small bits of text, one word even, the word “Let’s” for example. So you should be able to find 100 claims in three paragraphs. But I want you to analyze only as many as you can in one hour.

Let’s find claims in the first sentence:

Meanwhile people like James Peterson, husband of Kateri of the Olive Garden breakdown, are signing up for experiments. 

• “people like James Peterson” is a Quantitative and Comparative Claim.
• It declares that not just James Peterson, but others also, were signing up for experiments. It implies that a significant number of veterans were desperate enough to volunteer for experiments.
• The word “like” is the comparative part of the claim, indicating that lots of veterans shared similarities with Peterson.

Now the second sentence:

James was so anxious and so suicidal that he couldn’t even muster the self-preservation to get into inpatient treatment.

• “so anxious” and “so suicidal” are Qualitative Claims.
• They mean that James would have tolerated some degree of anxiety or even suicidality and gotten himself into inpatient treatment, but his condition was “so severe” that he couldn’t even motivate himself to protect his own life.