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When you analyze a text for meaning, citing evidence can help you to gain a deeper understanding of what you read. Authors include evidence to support and convey ideas in a text. You can use evidence to support your ideas about a text, to determine the author’s purpose, to support claims, to determine the meaning of words and phrases, and to answer questions about information in a text.
Evidence can be used to support explicit ideas in a text or to support inferences drawn from a text.
Oil spills from drilling deep into the ocean can be harmful to sea life.
Examine this excerpt from the article. Can you cite evidence to explain how land-locked vegetarians are impacted by massive fish kills?
The death of marine life has a direct impact on humans, since many of us rely on the ocean for food and work. Even land-locked vegetarians would feel the economic impact of massive fish kills, as the populations near the Gulf Coast learned in the wake of the BP oil spill. A catastrophic change in fish populations also could make people leave some coastal areas in droves, as they look for other places to earn a living.
— Science Net Links, 2010
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