CHAPTER SEVEN

Making Good Arguments: An Overview

In this chapter we discuss the nature of a research argument and the five
questions whose answers constitute one.

You can’t wait to plan an argument supporting the answer to your

question until you have every last bit of data. In the >rst place, you’ll
never get them all. But more important, you can’t know what data
you need until you sketch the argument they >t into. Only after
you sort your data into the elements of an argument that answers
your readers’ predictable questions can you see what research you
still have to do. But more than that, when you plan your argument
early, you grasp your material better and avoid wasted e=ort, espe-
cially return trips to the library.

7.1 A R G U M E N T A S A C ON V E R S AT I O N W I T H RE A DERS
In a research report, you make a claim, back it with reasons, sup-
port them with evidence, acknowledge and respond to other views,
and sometimes explain your principles of reasoning. There’s noth-
ing arcane in any of that, because you do it in every conversation
that inquires thoughtfully into an unsettled issue:

A: I hear last semester was a little rocky. How do you think this term will
go? [A poses a problem that interests her, put in the form of a question.]
B: Better, I hope. [B makes a claim that answers the question.]
A: Why is that? [A asks for a reason to believe B’s claim.]

108
 Making Good Arguments 109

B: I’ll >nally be taking courses in my major. [B offers a reason.]

A: Why will that make a di=erence? [A doesn’t see how B’s reason is rel-
evant to his claim that he will do better.]
B: When I take courses I’m interested in, I work harder. [B offers a general
principle that relates his reason to his claim.]
A: What courses? [A asks for evidence to back up B’s reason.]
B: History of architecture, introduction to design. [B offers specific in-
stances on which he based his reason.]
A: But what about that calculus course you have to take again? [A offers
a point that contradicts B’s reason.]
B: I know I had to drop it last time, but I found a really good tutor.
[B acknowledges A’s objection and responds to it.]
A: But won’t you be taking >ve courses? [A raises another reservation.]
B: I know. It won’t be easy. [B concedes a point he cannot refute.]
A: Will you pull up your GPA? [A asks about the limits of B’s claim.]
B: I should. I’m hoping for a 3.0, as long as I don’t have to get a part-
time job. [B limits the scope of his claim and adds a condition.]

If you can imagine yourself in that conversation, as either A or B,

you’ll >nd nothing strange about assembling the argument of a
research report, because every argument, research or not, is built
out of the answers to >ve questions in that conversation, ques-
tions that you must ask yourself on your readers’ behalf:

1. What is my claim?
2. What reasons support my claim?

3. What evidence supports my reasons?

4. Do I acknowledge alternatives / complications / objections, and
how do I respond?
5. What principle makes my reasons relevant to my claim? (We
call this principle a warrant.)
 110 m a k i n g a c l a i m a n d s u p p o r t i n g i t

Clarifying Some Terms

So far, we’ve used two terms to name the sentence that sums up the
results of your research. In the context of questions, we called it your
answer. In the context of problems, we called it your solution. Now in the
context of an argument, we’ll call it your claim.
• A claim is a sentence that asserts something that may be true or
false and so needs support: The world is warming up.
• The main claim of a report is the sentence (or more) that the whole
report supports (some call this sentence your thesis). If you wrote a
report to prove that the world is warming up, the sentence stating
that would be your main claim.
• A reason is a sentence supporting a claim, main or not.
These terms can be confusing, because a reason is also a (sub)claim
that can be supported by more reasons. What we call it depends on its
context. For example:
TV can have harmful psychological e=ects on childrenmain claim be-
cause when they are constantly exposed to violent images, they
come to think violence is natural.claim/reason 1 supporting main claim Those ex-
posed to lots of such visual entertainment tend to adopt the values
of what they see.claim/reason 2 supporting reason 1
Reasons support main claims, but “lower” reasons can support
“higher” reasons.

7.2 S U P P O R T I N G Y O U R CL A I M
At the core of every research report is the answer to your research
question, the solution to your problem—your main claim. You
have to back up that claim with two kinds of support: reasons and
evidence.

7.2.1 Base Claims on Reasons

The >rst kind of support, a reason, is a statement that gives your
readers cause to accept your claim. We often join a reason to a
claim with because:

The emancipation of Russian peasants was an empty gestureclaim

because it did not improve the material quality of their daily
lives.reason
 Making Good Arguments 111

TV violence can have harmful psychological e=ects on childrenclaim

because their constant exposure to violent images makes them
think that violence is natural.reason

You usually need more than one reason to support a contestable

claim, and in a detailed argument, each reason will usually be a
separate sentence.

7.2.2 Base Reasons on Evidence

The second kind of support is the evidence on which you base
your reasons. Now the distinction between reasons and evidence
can seem just a matter of semantics, and in some contexts the
words do seem interchangeable:

You have to base your claim on good reasons.

You have to base your claim on good evidence.

But they are not synonyms, and distinguishing them is crucial in

making sound arguments. Compare these two sentences:

What evidence do you base your reason on?

What reason do you base your evidence on?

That second sentence seems odd: we don’t base evidence on rea-

sons; we base reasons on evidence.
There are other di=erences:

• We think up reasons by the action of our mind.

• We have to search for evidence “out there” in the “hard” reality
of the world, then make it available for everyone to see.
It makes no sense to ask, Where do I go to see your reasons? It
does make sense to ask, Where do I go to see your evidence? For ex-
ample, we can’t see TV naturalizing violence for children, but we
could see a child answer the question: Do you think that >ghting
on TV is real? In principle, evidence is what you and your readers
can see, touch, taste, smell, or hear (or is accepted by everyone as
a remembered fact—the sun came up yesterday morning). That
 112 making a claim and supporting it

oversimpli>es the idea of “evidence from out there,” but it illus-

trates the di=erence between evidence and reasons.
In casual conversation, we usually support a claim with just a
reason:

We should leave.claim It looks like rain.reason

Few ask, What’s your evidence that it looks like rain? But when you
address serious issues, readers expect you to base each reason on
its own foundation of evidence, because careful readers don’t ac-
cept reasons at face value. They ask for the evidence, the data, the
facts on which you base those reasons:

TV violence can have harmful psychological e=ects on childrenclaim 1

because those exposed to lots of TV tend to adopt the values of
what they see.reason 1 supporting claim 1/claim 2 Constant exposure to violent
images makes them unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.reason 2
supporting reason 1 and claim 2 Smith (1997) found that children ages 5–7 who

watched more than three hours of violent television a day were 25

percent more likely to say that what they saw on television was
“really happening.”evidence supporting reason 2

With reasons and evidence, we have the core of a research ar-

gument:

To o=er a complete argument, however, you must add at least one

more element and often a second: you must acknowledge other
points of view and o=er what we call warrants, which show how a
reason is relevant to a claim.

7.3 A C KN O WL E D G I N G A N D R E S P O N D I N G T O A N T I C IP AT E D
Q U E S T I O N S A ND O BJ E CT I O N S
A responsible researcher supports a claim with reasons based
on evidence. But unless your readers think exactly as you do (un-
likely, given the fact that you have to make an argument in the
>rst place), they may draw a di=erent conclusion or even think of
evidence you haven’t. No thoughtful reader will accept your claim
based solely on your views: you must also address theirs.
 Making Good Arguments 113

Careful readers will question every part of your argument, so

you must anticipate as many of their questions as you can, and
then acknowledge and respond to the most important ones. For
example, when readers consider the claim that children exposed
to violent TV adopt its values, they might wonder whether chil-
dren are drawn to TV violence because they are already inclined to
violence. If you think readers might ask that question, you would
be wise to acknowledge and respond to it:

TV violence can have harmful psychological e=ects on chil-

drenclaim 1 because those exposed to lots of it tend to adopt the
values of what they see.reason 1 supporting claim 1/claim 2 Their constant expo-
sure to violent images makes them unable to distinguish fantasy
from reality.reason 2 supporting reason 1 and claim 2 Smith (1997) found that chil-
dren ages 5–7 who watched more than three hours of violent
television a day were 25 percent more likely to say that most of
what they saw on television was “really happening.”evidence supporting
reason 2 Of course, some children who watch more violent entertain-

ment might already be attracted to violence.acknowledgment But Jones

(1999) found that children with no predisposition to violence
were as attracted to violent images as those with a violent his-
tory.response

The challenge all researchers face, however, is not just responding

to readers’ questions, alternatives, and objections, but imagining
them in the >rst place. (In chapter 10 we’ll discuss the questions
and objections you should expect.)
Since no research argument is complete without them, we add
acknowledgment / responses to our diagram to show that they re-
late to all the other parts of an argument:
 114 making a claim and supporting it

7.4 W A R R A N T I N G T H E R EL EVA N CE O F Y O UR RE A S O N S
Even when your readers agree that a reason is true, they may
still object that it’s not relevant to your claim. It’s what most of us
would say to this little argument:

We should leaveclaim because 2 + 2 = 4.reason

Most of us think, I don’t get it. What’s the connection?

This is where the logic of an argument can get di;cult to un-
derstand. For example, suppose you o=er this less bizarre argu-
ment:

We are facing signi>cantly higher health care costs in Europe and

North Americaclaim because global warming is moving the line of
extended hard freezes steadily northward.reason

Readers might accept the truth of that reason, but question its rel-
evance to the claim, asking:

What do higher health costs have to do with hard freezes? I don’t

see the connection.

To answer, you must o=er a general principle that justi>es relating

your particular reason to your particular claim:

When an area has fewer hard freezes, it must pay more to com-
bat new diseases carried by subtropical insects no longer killed by
those freezes.

Like all warrants, that one says that if a general circumstance

exists (an area has fewer hard freezes), then we can infer a general
consequence (that area will have higher costs to combat new dis-
eases). The logic behind all warrants is that if a generalization is
true, then so must be speci>c instances of it.
But for that logic to work, readers must agree with four things.
Two are easy to understand:

1. The warrant is true: fewer hard freezes in fact mean higher

medical costs.
2. The reason is true: hard freezes in fact are moving north.
 Making Good Arguments 115

The next two are more di;cult:

3. The speci>c circumstance in the reason quali>es as a plausible
instance of the general circumstance in the warrant.
4. The speci>c consequence in the claim quali>es as a plausible
instance of the general consequence in the warrant.

We can illustrate that logic like this:

As we’ll see, it’s not easy to decide when you even need a war-
rant. Experienced researchers state them only when they think
readers might question whether a reason is relevant to their claim.
If you think they will see its relevance, you don’t need a warrant.
But if they might not, you must add a warrant to justify the con-
nection, usually before you make it:

When an area has fewer hard freezes, it can expect higher medi-
cal costs to cope with diseases carried by subtropical insects that
do not survive freezes.warrant Europe and North America must thus
expect higher health care costsmain claim because global warming is
 116 making a claim and supporting it

moving the line of extended hard freezes steadily north.reason In the

last one hundred years, the line of hard freezes lasting more than
two weeks has moved north at the rate of roughly . . .evidence

We can add warrants to our diagram to show that they connect

a claim and its supporting reason:

(We know this matter of warrants is not easy to grasp; we explain

it again in more detail in chapter 11.)

7.5 BU I L D I N G A C O M P L E X AR G U M E N T O U T O F S I M P L E O N ES
Those >ve elements constitute the core of a “basic” argument. But
arguments in research reports are more complex.

• We almost always support a claim with two or more reasons,

each of which must be supported by its own evidence and per-
haps justi>ed by its own warrant.

• Since readers think of many alternatives and objections to

any complex argument, careful researchers typically have to
respond to more than one or two of them.
Moreover, each element of an argument may itself have to be
treated as a subclaim, supported by its own argument:
 Making Good Arguments 117

• Each response to an objection may need reasons and evidence

to support it.

• If your readers doubt the truth of a warrant, you may have to

treat it as a subclaim and support it with its own argument, in-
cluding reasons, evidence, and perhaps even its own warrant
with its own acknowledgments and responses.
Only the evidence “stands alone,” but even then you must explain
where you got it and maybe why you think it’s reliable, and that
may require yet another argument.
And >nally, most arguments include background, de>nitions,
explanations of issues that readers might not understand, and
so on. If, for example, you were making an argument about the
relationship between in?ation and money supply to readers not
familiar with economic theory, you would have to explain how
economists de>ne “money.” Serious arguments are complex con-
structions. Chapters 8–11 explain them in detail.

7.6 C R E AT I N G A N E TH O S BY TH I CK E N IN G Y O U R A RGU M EN T
This process of “thickening” an argument is one way that writ-
ers earn the con>dence of their readers. Readers judge your argu-
ments not just by the facts you o=er, but by how well you antici-
pate their questions and concerns. In so doing, they also judge the
quality of your mind, even your implied character, traditionally
called your ethos. Do you seem to be the sort of person who con-
siders issues from all sides, who supports claims with evidence
that readers accept, and who thoughtfully considers other points
of view? Or do you seem to be someone who sees only what mat-
ters to her and dismisses or even ignores the views of others?
When you acknowledge other views and explain your prin-
ciples of reasoning in warrants, you give readers good reason to
work with you in developing and testing new ideas. In the long
run, the ethos you project in individual arguments hardens into
your reputation, something every researcher must care about, be-
cause your reputation is the tacit sixth element in every argument
118 making a claim and supporting it

you write. It answers the unspoken question, Can I trust you? That
answer must be Yes.

Cognitive Overload: Some Reassuring Words

It’s at about this point that many students new to research begin to
feel overwhelmed. If so, your anxieties have less to do with your intel-
ligence than with inexperience. One of us was explaining to teachers of
legal writing how being a novice makes many >rst-year law students feel
like incompetent writers. At the end of the talk, one woman reported
that she had been a professor of anthropology whose published work
was praised for the clarity of her writing. Then she switched careers and
went to law school. She said that during her >rst six months, she wrote
so incoherently that she feared she was su=ering from a degenerative
brain disease. Of course, she was not: she was going through a kind of
temporary aphasia that a<icts most of us when we try to write about
matters we do not entirely understand for an audience we understand
even less. She was relieved to >nd that the better she understood the
law, the better she wrote about it.

In Craft of Research you write about a woman who switched from an-
thropology to law and suddenly found herself unable to write clearly.
After being an assistant professor of graphic design for five years, I
recently switched to anthropology and suddenly found that writing
anthropology papers is like pulling teeth. I thought to myself that I
might have a degenerative brain disorder! I laughed out loud when
I read about the anthropologist who switched to law. It made me
feel a bit better.