If you have ever graded a stack of 7th-grade argument essays that read like opinion pieces — "In my opinion, the character was brave because she was strong" — you already know the problem. The student wrote an opinion and inserted the word "because." That is not argument. Argument is a claim, evidence, and a sentence that connects them.
The five moves below give grades 6–8 students a structure for that work. Each move closes a specific gap: separating claim from opinion, anchoring every claim to text, inserting the missing reasoning sentence, sequencing evidence by weight, and forcing a counter-argument that survives scrutiny. Together they turn an opinion piece into an argument.
1. Separate claim from opinion
The first move is a definitional one. Treat claim and opinion as two different kinds of sentences with two different jobs. An opinion is a personal preference, belief, or judgment — it can be true or false, but it is not testable against a text. A claim is a statement about what a text does, says, or shows — and it can be supported, qualified, or rejected with evidence from the page.
Post the two-column rule on the board and require students to label every sentence in their draft:
Opinion — "The Hate U Give is a good book."
Claim — "In The Hate U Give, Starr's code-switching is what makes her a reliable narrator — the text shows her consciously choosing a voice for every room she enters."
The opinion can be true. But it cannot be defended with a quote. The claim can. After one round of labeling, students can usually tell the difference on their own. Run the exercise on a short excerpt from a culturally rich Grade 7 text — "The Weight of a Name" works well — and have students convert three of their own opinion sentences into claims.
2. Anchor every claim to a quoted piece of evidence
A claim without a quote is an opinion wearing a costume. The second move requires that every claim be followed, in the same paragraph, by at least one direct quotation from the text being argued about. Paraphrase is allowed — but only if the paraphrase is followed by the original line, too. This is the single most effective move in argument writing instruction.
The CER scaffold — Claim, Evidence, Reasoning — works when the evidence is a real quotation, not a summary. Try this three-sentence structure on the Grade 7 lesson "Between Two Worlds":
Claim: Mei-Lin's silence at home is not ignorance — it is a defense.
Evidence: The narrator writes, "I worked at this — hours in front of the bathroom mirror, sanding down the edges of my vowels."
Reasoning: The image of sanding suggests deliberate, controlled change — the opposite of silence born from having nothing to say.
Three sentences, one quoted line, and the argument is anchored. Without the quote, the claim is an opinion. With it, the claim is defensible.
3. Insert the missing reasoning sentence
The most common failure in middle-school argument writing is the missing so what. A student writes: "The author uses the word 'suitcase' because it sounds lonely. The suitcase represents the past." Two sentences, both about the text, no reasoning. The student has not told the reader why the connection they are drawing is meaningful.
Teach the reasoning sentence as its own structural unit. It cannot describe the text; it has to interpret it. Use a sentence frame that forces interpretation:
"This matters because ___."
"The reader is meant to notice that ___."
"If the author had chosen a different word/image, the passage would ___."
"This is similar to ___ earlier/later in the text, which suggests ___."
"The contrast between ___ and ___ is the point of the passage."
Post the frames. Require that every claim–evidence pair close with a sentence that begins with one of them. Run it on the Grade 6 lesson "The Suitcase and the Self" — students can pull a single image, claim what it represents, and complete the reasoning using the contrast frame. By the third round, students start reaching for the frames without the prompt.
4. Sequence evidence strongest-to-most-consequential
Students default to evidence in the order it appears in the text. That order is rarely the strongest argumentative order. The fourth move is to teach students to sequence their evidence by weight, not by chronology: lead with the most direct piece, follow with the most surprising, and close with the most consequential — the one that, if removed, would collapse the argument.
The order matters because the first piece anchors the reader's frame of agreement; the last piece governs what the reader takes away. Try this on the Grade 8 lesson "Dreams Deferred, Dreams Reclaimed":
Strongest (lead): "What happens to a dream deferred?" — the question itself is the speaker's claim that dreams are living things that can spoil.
Most surprising (middle): "Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" — comparing a dream to organic decay raises the stakes unexpectedly.
Most consequential (close): "Or does it explode?" — the final image makes inaction a public danger, not just a private loss.
When students can rank their evidence by argumentative weight, they are no longer summarizing the text. They are building a sequence. This is the move that separates summary from argument — and it is teachable in two passes.
5. Force a counter-argument that survives scrutiny
The fifth move is the one students resist the most — because it asks them to argue against themselves. A counter-argument is not a dismissal of the opposing view; it is a serious, evidence-anchored version of the strongest objection a fair-minded reader could make, followed by a response that limits, qualifies, or extends the original claim.
The structure has three required parts:
1. Steel-man. State the strongest version of an opposing view, fairly.
2. Concede what is true. Acknowledge the part of the opposing view the text actually supports.
3. Limit, qualify, or extend. Show what the original claim still explains that the opposing view does not.
Try the move on a culturally complex text — the Grade 8 lesson "Dreams Deferred" works because the imagery invites a strong opposing read:
Steel-man: Some readers hear Hughes' poem as resignation — the dream has dried up, and the explosion is just a fantasy of force.
Concede: The "dry up" and "fester" images do support that reading. The poem does not deny that deferred dreams rot.
Limit: But the poem's final image — "Does it explode?" — refuses closure. The question mark keeps the deferred dream alive as a live possibility, not just a historical fact.
When students can steel-man fairly, concede honestly, and then narrow their own claim, they have written an argument that survives a skeptical reader. That is the move that earns an argument essay its highest marks — and that is also the move that transfers to every other discipline.
None of these moves replace your judgment. They support it. Pick one move this week. Run it on a single argument prompt with a single text. Run it again on Wednesday with a different text. By Friday, your students have a piece of a structure they did not have on Monday. That is the work.