Student's guide to writing college papers, Fourth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2010
Assemble the core of your argument
Planning your argument
Writing your paper
At the core of your argument is your claim, supported by your reasons for believing it and the evidence that grounds those reasons. To that core you will add at least one more element: you must acknowledge and respond to your readers' questions, objections, and alternative points of view. Most students find these elements easy to understand when they think of them in light of the predictable questions they answer:
What do you want me to believe?
Why should I believe that?
How do you know that's true?
What about my ideas on this matter?
The fifth element, a warrant, is less common and more difficult to understand and use; you can build perfectly adequate arguments without them. So if you struggle with them, focus on the four elements that your readers will always expect to see.
Before you address the views and concerns of your readers, you have to be clear about your own. So your first step is to assemble the claim, reasons, and evidence that make up the core of your argument.
6.3.1 Turn Your Working Hypothesis into a Claim
In the early stages of your research, your job was to find a question and imagine a tentative answer. We called that answer your working hypothesis—the most promising answer to your research question that you would keep around, but only on probation. Now that you think you can build a case to support that hypothesis, it's time to take it off probation and think of it as your main claim. That main claim is the center of your argument, the answer to your question, the point of your report (some teachers call it a thesis).
SOME TERMINOLOGY
Your Claim's Many Names
Every good research paper is built around a main idea, a most important result, a conceptual head honcho that dominates all the rest. It has many names because you have to think about it from many points of view. From the point of view of your problem statement, it is your main result, the answer to your question. Doing your research, call it your working hypothesis. Making your argument, call it your main claim. Organizing your paper, call it your main point. You need so many names for this one idea because it plays so many roles in your paper.
6.3.2 Evaluate Your Claim
Start a new first page of your storyboard (if you already have one, replace it). At the bottom, state your claim in a sentence or two. Be specific, because the words in this claim will help you plan and execute your draft. Avoid vague value words like important, interesting, significant, and the like. Compare the following two claims:
Masks play a big role in many religious ceremonies.
In cultures from pre-Columbian America to Africa and Asia, masks allow religious celebrants to bring deities to life so that worshippers experience them directly.
Now judge the significance of your claim (So what? again). A significant claim doesn't make a reader think, I know that, but rather, Really? What makes you think so? (Review 1.2.) These next claims are too trivial to justify writing a report on them:
This report discusses teaching popular legends such as the Battle of the Alamo to elementary school students. (So what if it does?)
Teaching our national history through popular legends such as the Battle of the Alamo is common in elementary education. (So what if it is?)
Of course, what your readers will count as interesting depends on what they know. But that's hard to predict when you're early in your research career. So don't think you've failed if you can't find a convincing answer to So what? If you're writing one of your first reports, assume that the most important judge of the significance of your argument is you. It is enough if you alone think your answer is significant, if it makes you think, Well, I didn't understand that when I started.
But if you think your claim is vague or trivial, don't try to build an argument to support it. If you can find no reason to make a case for your claim, neither will your readers. Find a new claim.
6.3.3 Support Your Claim with Reasons and Evidence
It may seem obvious that you must back up a claim with reasons and evidence. But it's easy to confuse those two words because we often use them as if they mean the same thing:
What reasons do you base your claim on?
What evidence do you base your claim on?
But they mean different things:
✵ We think up logical reasons, but we collect factual evidence; we don't collect factual reasons and think up logical evidence.
✵ We base reasons on evidence; we don't base evidence on reasons.
✵ A reason is an idea, and you don't have to cite its source (if you thought of it yourself ). In contrast, evidence usually comes from outside your mind, so you must always cite a reliable source for it. Even if you found your evidence through your own observation or experiment, you must show what you did to find it.
In short: Reasons are your ideas that need the support of evidence; evidence is composed of facts that need no support beyond a reference to a reliable source.
The problem is that what you think is a true fact and therefore hard evidence, your readers might not. For example, suppose a researcher offers the following claim and reason, backed up by this “hard” evidence:
Early Alamo stories reflected values already in the American character.claim The story almost instantly became a legend of American heroic sacrifice.reason Jones reports that soon after the battle, many newspapers used the story to celebrate our heroic national character.evidence
If readers accept that statement as an unquestioned fact, they may accept it as evidence. But a skeptical reader, the kind you should expect (even hope for), is likely to ask: How many is “many”? Which newspapers? In news stories or editorials? What exactly did they say? How many papers didn't mention it? Even if they think Jones is a reliable source, they expect the researcher to offer more specific facts: the numbers behind “many,” the specific forms of “celebration,” perhaps even quotes from news stories.
To be sure, we sometimes accept a claim based only on a reason, if that reason seems self-evidently true or is from a trusted authority:
We are all created equal,reason so no one has a natural right to oppress us.claim
Instructors in introductory courses often let students support reasons with no more than the reports of an authoritative source: Wilson says X about religious masks, Yang says Y, Schmidt says Z. Find out from your teacher if you can use the claims of authorities as evidence. But when you do more advanced work, you have to look for harder evidence than the word of an authority. Readers want evidence drawn not from a secondary source but from primary sources or your own observation (see 4.1).
Review your storyboard: Can you back up each reason with what your readers will think is evidence of the right kind, quantity, and quality? Might your readers think that what you offer as evidence needs more support? Or a better source? If so, you must find more data or acknowledge the limits of what you have.
Your claim, reasons, and evidence make up the core of your argument, but it needs at least one more element, maybe two.