An Integrated Line of Reasoning and Illustration

A paragraph can name three real events and still fall flat if none of them are explained. That's because Development and Support doesn't count examples, it counts reasoning. The scorer is tracing a chain: claim, then a reason the claim is true, then an example that fits the reason, then a sentence explaining why that example proves the point. Miss the last link and the example just sits there, true but useless to the argument.

Building that chain means slowing down after you drop an example in. Say your claim is that early exposure to failure builds resilience. Your reason might be that failure forces problem-solving under pressure. Your example: a student whose first robotics competition ended in a broken circuit. The missing step most drafts skip is significance: spell out how that broken circuit forced the student to debug under time pressure, and how that specific skill is what the claim predicted would grow. Without that last sentence, the example floats next to the claim instead of proving it.

This is why a third example rarely rescues a paragraph when the second one was left unexplained. Adding length doesn't repair a broken link, it just adds another unfinished one. The same logic caps paragraphs where every example restates one idea: the line of reasoning touches the same point three times instead of advancing through reason, complication, and significance. A paragraph that develops one example fully, then uses a second to extend or complicate that idea, builds a line that keeps climbing, instead of pacing in place.