Personal Anecdote v Facts to Offer More Reliable Proof

Obviously, when you use a personal experience to support something you want to argue, you must realize that your experience doesn't necessarily "prove" something; it merely illustrates.

For example, if you write about homework usefulness in K-12, you will state your position, and then probably use your own and/or friends' experiences to back up your position.

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Note below how the use of facts has more weight; they tend to offer a kind of "proof" that's more reliable.

This is about the journalist Jack Kelley from USA TODAY who was fired for plagiarism and fabrication.

The team's initial investigation showed Kelley had made up substantial portions of at least eight stories. The team considered a story fabricated if expense reports, phone records, official documents or witnesses clearly contradicted all or parts of what was published.

The subsequent review shows that substantial parts of at least 11 others, including most of Kelley's many notable stories, are simply untrue. Among them: Kelley's accounts that he found diaries alongside the corpses of Iraqi soldiers in 1991; traveled to a village in Somalia in 1992; discovered matches made from napalm that could burn through glass ashtrays in 1993; trekked into the mountains of Yugoslavia with the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999; listened to a tape that captured the downing of a missionary flight over Peru in 2000; visited with Elian Gonzalez's father inside the father's house in Cuba in 2000; visited Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 2001; and spent time near the cave complexes of Tora Bora in 2001.

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Quoting research summaries or using graphs and charts from reliable studies to substantiate your claims are other ways of offering more "proof" for your position.

A study by the Census Bureau Society of Actuaries, which looked at life insurance mortality rates to show the probability of death within a year for people 90 years old, documented a decrease from 28 % in 1941 to 12.2% in 2001, indicating a significant increase in longevity for today's elderly population. This, in turn, has a profound effect on the demand for geriatric health care services.