Support
	
Experience (anecdotal).  Support based on anecdotal experience.  It characterizes the 
author's personal experience.  It's usually about one particular occurrence.

	Example from BARTH:  "My experience winnowing fiction applications to 
	the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars is that if not many of them 
	knock our socks off . . . only a few are downright incompetent." p. 1, para. 2

Statistics.  Descriptions of the frequency or quantity of a certain type of experience.

Example from BARTH:  "An annual national poetry competition, for the Walt 
Whitman Award, a few years back received 1,475 manuscript volumes of verse 
from which to select and publish one winner;" p. 1, para.2

Authority.  Citations to other people who have provided information or points that lend 
credibility to an author's own points.  Usually author establishes credentials of the 
authority and quotes them (or paraphrases them).

Example quote from BARTH:  "In his excellent book 'The Art of Fiction' the late 
John Gardner cites Ernest Hemingway's remark that the way for a writer to learn 
his craft is simply to go away and write.  He then properly adds, 'Hemingway, it 
may help to remember, went away for free 'tutorials' to two of the finest teachers 
then living, Sherwood Anderson and Gertrude Stein.'"

Example paraphrase from BARTH:  "as the critic Earl Rovit has observed, the 
novelist in America practices a vocation that is seldom quite a profession, 
economically speaking .  . . ." para. 6.

Asking critical questions about support

• Experience (anecdotal)
How typical (representative) is this experience?
	Is the author credible?
		Prejudiced? Reliable? Competent? Consistent?
• Statistics
	How, when, where, any by whom were the statistics gathered?
	What is the reliability of the statistics?
	Are they accurate?
		Are they relevant?
		Are they consequential?
	Are they merely circumstantial?
• Authority
	Is the authority credible?
		Prejudiced? Reliable? Competent? Consistent?

Support