A manual for writers of research papers, theses, and dissertations, Ninth edition - Kate L. Turabian 2018

What a research argument is and is not
Constructing your argument
Research and writing

5.1 What a Research Argument Is and Is Not

5.2 Build Your Argument around Answers to Readers’ Questions

5.3 Turn Your Working Hypothesis into a Claim

5.4 Assemble the Elements of Your Argument

5.4.1 State and Evaluate Your Claim

5.4.2 Support Your Claim with Reasons and Evidence

5.4.3 Acknowledge and Respond to Anticipated Questions and Objections

5.4.4 Establish the Relevance of Your Reasons

5.5 Prefer Arguments Based on Evidence to Arguments Based on Warrants

5.6 Assemble an Argument

Most of us would rather read than write. There is always another article to read, one more source to track down, just a bit more data to gather. But well before you’ve done all the research you’d like to do, there comes a point when you must start thinking about the first draft of your paper. You might be ready when your storyboard starts to fill up and you’re satisfied with how it looks. You will know you’re ready when you think you can sketch a reasonable case to support your working hypothesis (see 2.3). If your storyboard is full and you still can’t pull together a case strong enough to plan a draft, you may have to rethink your hypothesis, perhaps even your question. But you can’t be certain where you stand in that process until you at least try to plan that first draft.

In this chapter we explain how to build your argument; in the next, how to organize it. As you gain experience, you’ll learn to combine those two steps into one.

5.1 What a Research Argument Is and Is Not

The word argument has negative associations these days because it evokes images of people shouting at one another. In that kind of argument the goal is to win, to bludgeon or intimidate one’s opponent into assent or silence. But a research argument isn’t like that. As we suggested in chapter 1, it is more like a conversation with a community of receptive but skeptical colleagues. Such readers won’t necessarily oppose your claims (although they might), but they also won’t accept them until they see good reasons based on reliable evidence and until you respond to their questions and reservations.

When you make (not have) an argument in a face-to-face conversation, you cooperate with your listeners. You state your reasons and evidence not as a lecturer would to a silent audience but as you would engage friends sitting around a table: you offer a claim and reasons to believe it; they probe for details, raise objections, or offer their points of view; you respond, perhaps with questions of your own; they ask more questions. At its best, it’s an amiable but thoughtful back-and-forth that develops and tests the best case that you and they can make together.

In writing, even when done collaboratively, that kind of cooperation is harder. You must not only answer your imagined readers’ questions but also ask them on their behalf—as often and as sharply as real readers will. Your aim isn’t to think up clever rhetorical strategies that will persuade readers to accept your claim regardless of how good it is. It is to test your claim and especially its support, so that you offer your readers the best case you can make. In a good research paper, readers hear traces of that imagined conversation.

As we’ve said, reasoning based on evidence isn’t the only way to reach a sound conclusion, sometimes not even the best way. We often make good decisions by relying on intuition, feeling, even spiritual inspiration. But when we try to explain why we believe our claims are sound and why others should too, we have no way to demonstrate how we reached them, because we can’t offer intuitions, feelings, or inspirations as evidence for readers to evaluate. We can only say we had them and ask readers to take our claim on faith, a request that readers of research papers rarely grant.

When you make a research argument, therefore, you must lay out your reasons and evidence so that your readers can consider them; then you must imagine both their questions and your answers. Doing all this is hard, but remembering how arguments work in everyday conversations will help you.