But here we’ve got lasagna, and salad with an array of dressing choices, and a store-bought frosted Bundt cake with chocolate chips in it!

– It is a factual claim that can be proven because there were witnesses to what was there.

There is no dining-room table—when they bought the house years ago, they thought they’d finish it up real nice like they did with another house, before the war, but nobody’s up for that now, so we all huddle around the coffee table in the living room.

– It is a causal claim. The cause is the war, and the effect is that there is not a dining room table.

– It is also a comparative claim because two different houses are being compared in the sentence.

Brannan and I make fun of Caleb for being three years older than us, so old, Caleb makes jokes that it does indeed feel like he and Brannan have been married for-ever.

– It is a factual claim. It presents the fact that Caleb is three years older than Brannan and the author.

– It is also an attributive claim where the author attributes a claim to Caleb.

At the front door, we all beam at each other in the warm way people do when they’re separating after a nice meal. Caleb is in such a good mood that Brannan asks if he’s up for putting Katie to bed so she can go lie down. Forty-five minutes later, he wakes her up screaming. Not two days after that, he tells her he’s leaving her. “I’m going to get it over with and do it so you don’t have to,” he says, because that’s just the way the scale goes that day, when he weighs the pain of being alone versus the pain of being a burden.

– The entire paragraph is illustrative claim. It illustrates the idea that Caleb can be fine one moment and not fine the next.

– The last sentence in the paragraph is a comparative claim because it is comparing two different kinds of pain.