1.

Try giving students a series of factual statements and ask them to insert an opinion into the statement by adding only a word or two, e.g.:

Factual statement: "Yesterday, the temperature reached 90 degrees."

Blend of fact and opinion: "Yesterday the temperature reached a sizzling 90 degrees."

This exercise is well worth doing because students have less trouble recognizing pure opinions or pure facts than they do spotting statements that subtly blend the two.

2.

Ask them to bring some textbook examples of seemingly informative passages that still manage to suggest a personal point of view. Guide their search by telling them that the best place to find these examples is in history or sociology texts.

3.

Because students sometimes think that the insertion of an opinion into a seemingly factual statement is always an intentional and slightly dishonest act, you might want to talk about the difficulty of achieving pure objectivity when our experience, training, and education incline us to look at certain things and ignore others.

4.

For additional practice with fact and opinion, try Quiz 1 for Chapter 10 of Reading for Results.

5.

The textbook section "Finding Facts on the World Wide Web" (p. 361) addresses the problem of misinformation in cyberspace. Given how readily students turn to the Internet for research, I think this is a point well worth repeating, particularly where statistics are concerned. Websites with causes to promote are fond of using statistics, but as author and professor Joel Best points out in his wonderful book More Damned Lies and Statistics (Univ. of California Press, 2004): "What is absent is the sort of evidence needed to give the statistics any credibility." (Best, p. 21) Stress that statistics floating in cyberspace with no attribution cannot be considered accurate and need to be checked.

6.

I'm probably biased, but I think the tutorial on fact and opinion in the additional materials for Reading for Thinking can really help students clarify the distinction between the two kinds of statements.