Literary Evidence and the P.A.R.S.A. Test1
Literary evidence, like all other kinds of evidence, must meet certain criteria to be
considered valid by readers (i.e., to provide adequate support for the claims to which it is
attached). Standards of evidence change according to a) the extent to which you’re trying
to change your reader’s thinking on a given topic and b) the degree to which readers have
a stake in accepting or rejecting your argument, but one truth remains constant: if you
don’t use evidence that your readers judge to be Precise, Accurate, Representative,
Sufficient, and Authoritative (P.A.R.S.A.), they will generally find it difficult to trust you
as a writer and accept your claims, sometimes even when their views closely parallel
your own. Good evidence convinces readers that you know what you’re talking about
and that your claims are worth entertaining; even if your readers ultimately disagree with
some of the conclusions you draw, the quality of your evidence can persuade them to
consider possibilities they might previously have rejected. And some kinds of evidence
are powerful enough to change the reader’s entire way of reading literature—or seeing
the world.
Keep these P.A.R.S.A. criteria in mind whenever you supply or read a piece of evidence,
asking yourself whether the evidence adequately supports the claim(s) it is meant to
justify. Remember that the stronger a writer’s claims are, and the more his or her readers
have at stake in the issue, the more compelling and unassailable the writer’s evidence has
to be.
P. Evidence Must Be Precise
Many arguments about literature hinge on questions of definition and history: the setting
(or moving) of cultural and chronological boundaries, the explanation of complex
movements and social phenomena, the delineation of the meaning of literary key words
like “tragedy,” “modernism,” or “sympathy.” Other arguments focus on questions of
fact: when, where, why, and/or by whom a particular text was written, which version of
the text was written first or last, or whether a certain word was added by the author, the
editor, or someone else. Many other arguments deal with problems of ethics, value, and
function: why authors make certain choices, what effects those choices have on readers,
and how authors, texts, cultures, and readers interact to produce a certain range of
meanings. Each of these types of argument calls for a high degree of precision in the
evidence used, involving not just the correctness (see Accuracy) but the exactness of the
evidence, its attention to detail and its strict confinement within the narrowest possible
definitional boundaries. It would be perfectly accurate, for instance, to write that “Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia was published in the early twentieth century, a time of great
controversy” but consider how much more precise the following statement would be:
“Willa Cather’s My Ántonia was published in 1918, a year that saw furious debate over
immigration and the nature of American identity at home while the first truly global war
raged abroad.” As long as the information you supply is relevant to your argument, you
1
Freely adapted from a handout by the University of Virginia Writing Program.
greatly boost the credibility of your claims by supporting them with solid facts and
interesting details instead of vague generalizations.
Other Examples:
(Precise) Izaak Walton, Donne’s friend and biographer, claims that the poet addressed “A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” to his wife, Ann, in 1611, ten years after their
clandestine marriage. The occasion was a voyage Donne was forced to make to the
Continent in order to...
(Less Precise) It has been claimed that Donne wrote “A Valediction: Forbidding
Mourning” to his wife a few years after their marriage, on the verge of an extended
absence.
A. Evidence Must Be Accurate
Before readers even begin to consider whether your evidence is Precise, Representative,
Sufficient, or Authoritative, they will start to form an opinion about your evidence’s
accuracy. Typographical errors or mishandled quotes of any kind weaken your
credibility, planting doubts about the validity of your claims—and your own integrity as a
thinker, researcher, and writer—in your readers’ minds. Double-check all quotes and
have a friend proofread your work, keeping in mind that modern word processing
programs can incorrectly “fix” unusual spellings or typographical conventions that may
be integral to the meaning of a cited passage—and which, even if they don’t seem
important, must be reproduced accurately to demonstrate that you’ve paid careful
attention to the text. Use a reputable style manual such as Diana Hacker’s Bedford
Handbook to ensure that your quotes conform to the required citation format, whether
MLA (Modern Language Association), Chicago (The Chicago Manual of Style) or
another widely accepted system. Educate yourself about—and scrupulously avoid!—the
different kinds of plagiarism, especially those forms of intellectual theft that are more
subtle than outright cutting and pasting without due acknowledgment. When you need to
alter a passage grammatically or introduce some other kind of editorial emendation, use
standard marks like the brackets ([ ]) and ellipsis (…) to show that your alterations are
intentional, e.g. “Melville writes at the end of the chapter ‘Stubb kills a Whale’ that the
mate ‘scatter[s] the dead ashes [of his pipe] over the water…thoughtfully eyeing the vast
corpse he ha[s] made’ (Moby-Dick 233).” When you want to preserve a misspelling or
other kind of error in the original text, use the word “sic” at the end of the quotation, e.g.
“In a famous 1929 letter to Ben Wasson, Faulkner writes, ‘Excuse recent letter. Didnt
mean to be stubborn and inconsiderate. Believe I am right, tho’ [sic] (Selected Letters
45).”
Other examples:
(Accurate) In lines 3-4 of our edition of John Donne’s “Song,” the speaker admonishes
his audience to“Tell [him]/…who cleft the devil’s foot[.]”
(Less accurate) In lines 34 of the poem Song, John Done admonished his audience to tell
him who cleft Satan’s foot.
R. Evidence Must Be Representative
It can sometimes be tempting to avoid mentioning pieces of evidence that contradict your
claims, to examine a piece of evidence out of context in order to defend a claim that you
want to believe even if the author doesn’t seem to agree with you, or to base an
interesting generalization about the book on one passage that, however provocative, does
not adequately epitomize the nature of the whole text. Academic honesty demands that
you avoid these temptations, addressing potential conflicts in evidence openly and
showing clearly how the evidence you quote fits in context. It is especially important to
keep clear whose intentions are being represented in a given passage, avoiding the
common tendency (for instance) to conflate a fictional character’s statements with the
meanings its author is trying to produce, à la “Mark Twain’s use of the ‘N word’ in this
passage obviously proves that he was a racist” instead of the more representative
“Huckleberry Finn’s strange use of the ‘N word’ in this passage brings into stark relief
the question of Mark Twain’s possible sympathy with his protagonist’s racist leanings.”
Other examples:
(Representative) Donne’s line “Teach me to hear mermaids singing” (5) in “Song” is one
more example of an impossible action, leading up to the ultimate impossibility: that of
finding a completely “true” and “fair” woman (l. 18).
(Less representative) Since mermaids, along with dragons and unicorns, were widely
believed to exist in Jacobean times, Donne’s line “Teach me to hear mermaids singing”
(5) in “Song” actually holds out the possibility that a completely “true and fair” woman
might exist (l. 18).
S. Evidence Must Be Sufficient
In order to accept a claim, readers must feel certain that they have been given enough
precise, accurate, representative, and authoritative evidence upon which to base their
decision. How much evidence counts as “enough” clearly depends on the relative
strength of your claims and the degree to which your reader is already inclined to accept
or reject them, along with the type of argument you’re producing; again, the greater the
degree of change you’re advocating in your reader’s way of thinking about the issue, the
more pieces of evidence you’ll need to muster. Some vast and controversial claims (such
as William Cronon’s famous “The time has come to rethink wilderness”) may need to be
supported with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of pieces of evidence, whereas some
claims are so relatively unproblematic—in other words so close to facts—that a couple of
simple illustrations of the claim may suffice. Don’t be fooled into thinking that there’s a
strict one-to-one correspondence between claims and evidence; every piece of evidence
in a 20-page paper, after all, is ultimately offered in support of one overarching thesis
(global claim), and in general the more evidence you introduce the stronger your paper
will be.
“Can you have too much evidence, though?” This problem is rarely encountered in
undergraduate essays. Far more common is the paucity of evidence, a problem that
irreparably damages your argument because it provides the reader with no reason to
accept your claims. Until someone warns you that you’re going overboard, make every
paper bristle with quotation marks and page numbers, giving your readers every possible
incentive to trust your argument. When in doubt, quote it.
Literary examples:
(Sufficient) Pound’s description of the bough as “wet,” “black,” and possessed of
“Petals” (l. 2) indicates that the metaphor is taken from springtime.
(Less sufficient) Pound’s description of the bough as “wet,” “black” and possessed of
“Petals” (l. 2) indicates that not only is this a poem about springtime, but that it deals
with the abduction of Persephone by the lord of the underworld, a place represented in
the poem by the noise- and smoke-filled space of the literal “Underground,” the Metro.
A. Evidence Must Be Authoritative
A few years ago television viewers across the country had to endure a painkiller
commercial that began with a soap opera star dressed in a doctor’s costume saying “I’m
not a doctor, but I play one on T.V…” Viewers may not have been able to explain what
exactly bothered them about the commercial, but they knew that it had a different effect
from what its makers intended: it made them not want to buy the painkiller rather than
vice versa. Here’s why. Any evidence the spokesperson supplied for the painkiller’s
effectiveness in that commercial—however scientifically valid—was immediately tainted
by his admission that he didn’t know what he was talking about, that he wasn’t a real
authority in the field of medicine. Similarly, but in less obvious ways, you can damage
the strength of your argument by applying evidence considered valid in one field to
another field in which it is not considered valid, by citing authors within the appropriate
field whose work has nonetheless been discredited, or by using sources your readers are
likely to consider outdated, biased, inaccurate, misleading, overly simplistic, or otherwise
not up to the standards of a college-level essay. You essentially tell the reader, “This
isn’t a valid argument, but it plays one on T.V…”
It can be tricky discerning between authoritative and less authoritative sources when
you’re just starting out in a given field, but certain questions can help evaluate any
source. First of all, if you’re citing a scholarly book, was it published by a major
university press (Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Columbia, University of California, and
so forth)? Has the author published other books or scholarly articles in this field?
(Remember that this is no guarantee of authoritativeness—the literary critic Harold
Bloom, for instance, is a hugely prolific author and editor but is no longer considered a
leading scholar by many of the people in his field). What do reviewers say about her or
him? What does your teacher think of the author? (Ask me!) If your source is a
magazine or journal, is it one subscribed to by your university library? Is it one readily
available in the check-out line at grocery stores? (If so, don’t use it unless you’re writing
a scholarly/critical analysis of popular culture). If it’s a Web site, do you know the
names of the Webmaster and author of the article you’re citing? How recently was the
site updated? How does the evidence they produce stand up to the P. A. R. S. A. test? Is
the site affiliated with a university course, university library, humanities center, or other
scholarly institution? (If not, please consider scrapping it). Some more general
questions: Do you have any reason to believe your source’s integrity has been
compromised by ulterior commercial, political, religious or other motives? Is the
source’s language marred by racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism, or other forms of hate
speech? Would your source (e.g., Microsoft Encarta) be considered a good source for
middle school or high school students but not for college-level work? (If so, you can go
ahead and use the source as a tool to find more advanced sources, but do not cite the
more basic source in your paper—it damages your credibility).
An important note respecting literary evidence: Students are often inclined to view the
author of a text as the ultimate authority as to what it means. This is completely
understandable, not least of all because of the shared etymology and philosophical history
of the words “author” and “authority,” but it can lead you into dangerous territory.
Authors can have any number of reasons for misrepresenting their texts and misleading
their interviewers, and their memories are generally as faulty as everyone else’s. Should
you avoid using quotes about texts by their authors, then? Not at all—the author can
indeed offer incredibly important and rich sources of insight into the text under
discussion. Always be on your guard, though, remembering not to mistake an author’s
private interpretations of a public text for the gospel truth.
Literary examples:
(Authoritative): In The Dance of the Intellect, Marjorie Perloff [a leading scholar of 20thcentury poetry] writes of “This Is Just to Say” that Williams “mistakes sight for sound,”
confusing his poem’s typographic symmetries for metrical regularity (97).
(Less authoritative): In a 1950 interview with John W. Gerber, when asked what it is that
makes “This Is Just to Say” a poem, Williams replied, “In the first place, it is metrically
absolutely regular…So, dogmatically speaking, it has to be a poem because it goes that
way, don’t you see!” (Gerber 227). In what ways is the poem “metrically absolutely
regular,” then? First of all,…