Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010

What a research argument is and is not
Planning your argument
Writing your paper

6.1 What a Research Argument Is and Is Not

6.2 Build Your Argument Around Answers to Readers' Questions

6.2.1 Identify (or Invent) Target Readers Interested in Your Question

6.2.2 How Arguments Grow from Questions

6.3 Assemble the Core of Your Argument

6.3.1 Turn Your Working Hypothesis into a Claim

6.3.2 Evaluate Your Claim

6.3.3 Support Your Claim with Reasons and Evidence

6.4 Acknowledge and Respond to Readers' Points of View

6.4.1 Imagining Readers' Views

6.4.2 Acknowledging and Responding

6.5 Use Warrants if Readers Question the Relevance of Your Reasons

6.6 An Argument Assembled

Most of us would rather read sources than start to write a draft. But well before you've done all the research you'd like to do, you have to start thinking about the first draft of your paper. You might be ready when your storyboard is full and you're satisfied with how it looks. But you can't be certain until you start planning that first draft. Do that in two steps:

✵ Sort your notes into the elements of a research argument.

✵ Organize those elements into a coherent form.

In this chapter, we explain how to assemble the elements of your argument; in the next, how to organize them. As you gain experience, you'll learn to combine those two steps into one process.

6.1 What a research argument is and is not

The word argument has bad associations these days, partly because radio and TV stage so many nasty ones. But the argument in a research paper is not the verbal combat we so often get from politicians and pundits. It doesn't try to intimidate an opponent into silence or submission. In fact, there's rarely an “opponent” at all. A research argument is like an amiable conversation in which you and your readers reason together to solve a problem. But those readers won't accept that solution until they hear a case for it: good reasons, reliable evidence that grounds those reasons, and your responses to their reasonable questions and reservations.

It is challenging enough to maintain a sense of amiable cooperation with others who do not share your views when you can talk face-to-face. But it is doubly difficult when you write, because you usually write alone. You have to imagine your readers' role in that conversation: not only do you have to hold up your end, but your imagination has to hold up theirs. Your argument can answer your readers' questions only if you can first imagine those readers asking those questions for you to answer.

When readers hear traces of their questions in your written report, they recognize that you've thought not just about your views but about theirs as well. Remember this core principle of argument: Each of us can believe what we want, for whatever reason we want, but we have no right to ask others to believe it unless we can give them good reasons to do so, reasons that make sense from their point of view.

When you make a research argument, you must lay out your reasons and evidence so that your readers can see how you reasoned your way to a conclusion; then you must imagine their questions and answer them. That sounds challenging—and for a complex argument it can be. But it's more familiar than you may think, because in fact you have that kind of conversation every day.