DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN FACTS AND OPINIONS
Writers often present facts as evidence to support their ideas. Those facts may appear as examples to illustrate ideas or to refer to events, collections of data, or information in written sources. Factual statements are based on observations that can be demonstrated to be true. As a critical reader, you will have to check each observation against other available evidence to make sure it is true and is indeed a fact.
Facts and opinions are very different. Unlike facts, opinions express an attitude or a point of view about a fact or a set of facts. People have opinions about how welfare should be reformed, about whether citizens should be permitted to carry guns, about who is the best team in baseball. Opinions by themselves may be interesting to state, to hear, and to debate. But they are of little value unless they are supported with evidence in the form of facts, details, examples, reasons, and information.
It is a fact, for example, that George W. Bush was the forty-third president of the United States. To say that he was one of the greatest American presidents would be to express an opinion. The opinion is arguable—that is, different people might have different opinions about Bush's greatness.
A statement of opinion cannot be completely proved or disproved the way a statement of fact can. Statements of opinion reflect the point of view of a speaker or a writer. For example, you may think college athletes should spend more time on their studies and less on their sports—or vice versa. Your opinion on this issue may reflect your point of view about the value of college sports in general. The evidence you use as support for your opinion might include such things as the money and/or the prestige athletic teams bring to the university. It might also include statistics about the graduation rates of NCAA athletes or about the ratio of college to professional athletes.
Critical readers distinguish between facts and opinions. They evaluate an author’s opinions by considering how well they are supported by evidence in the form of facts, details, statistics, and other kinds of information. As a thoughtful critical reader, you are obliged to consider how well a writer’s opinion is supported by facts.
One way to identify opinions is to be alert for words that indicate that an opinion is being expressed. Words and phrases such as the following often introduce an author’s expression of an opinion:
Introductory Opinion Words
| apparently | it might be | one possibility is |
| in my view | it seems | perhaps |
| it appears | maybe |
Notice how these words also seem to qualify what a writer says. That is, the writer who introduces an idea or an opinion by saying “it appears” or “perhaps” is not insisting that he or she is right or that this idea or opinion is either the best or the only one that might be held. Instead, such opinion words indicate that a writer recognizes that his or her opinion is one among others and that the ideas and opinions of other people (including readers) also have merit, even when they differ from those of the writer.
The following chart can help you distinguish between facts and opinions.
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Practice Distinguishing between Facts and Opinions
Statements of opinion come in various forms and thus can be tricky to recognize. Sometimes an opinion is expressed as an indication that something is possible or even probable. You’ve probably heard and read that global temperatures will continue to rise over the next decade. While this may indeed be highly likely, it is, nonetheless, a prediction about the future and thus an opinion rather than a verifiable statement of fact. Finally, opinions can appear as suggestions for what should be done (or not be done). For example, a magazine editor who writes that readers should recycle more to help the environment is making a good suggestion—but it’s still an opinion.
If facts can be labeled true or false, accurate or inaccurate, right or wrong, how can we characterize opinions? Opinions can be well founded or ill founded, sound or unsound, reasonable or unreasonable. But be careful: What appears sound or reasonable to one person may seem unsound or unreasonable to another.
Facts and opinions are both important. Facts provide information and evidence on which to form opinions. Opinions put a personal stamp on a topic or offer an individual perspective on an issue. It is important for critical reading that, first, you are able to distinguish between fact and opinion and, second, you are able to evaluate how well supported, how carefully thought through opinions may be.