In this post I want to share a great way of building an argument for an essay, article, or thesis chapter. I learned it when I was an undergraduate and I have used it to great profit in my own writing. It is also one of the first research hacks I share with new undergraduate and graduate research students I teach.
When you begin to formulate an argument in your essay or article, stand back and say to yourself “Suppose it’s not as simple as that. Suppose there’s something I’m missing, something I haven’t thought of. What is that thing?”
Asking this question will help you to avoid one of the most common mistakes in student writing: not that what you say is wrong, but that you don’t push it far enough. I have lost count of the undergraduate essays I have read that begin to argue their point very promisingly but just stop before the job is done, or stop at the moment when the argument begins to get really interesting.
Here are some examples of the question in action. It’s not as simple as that because…
- …there’s a counter-example that you haven’t addressed.
- …one of the key words in your argument (or in the essay title) is ambiguous and its different meanings result in different responses/trains of thought.
- …if what you’ve argued already is true, then there are big implications for something relevant that you haven’t yet discussed.
- …there’s a third (or fourth, or fifth…) option that doesn’t fit into your either/or schema.
- …your argument, or the argument you are discussing, undermines itself by the way it is put (example: a very clearly written explanation of why language is always unclear).
- …your argument could just as easily prove the opposite conclusion (or at least a different conclusion) to the one you want it to support.
To read all the research hacks posted to date, please click here.
Don’t just cycle through this question once. Add layers of complexity to your argument to the point where you have covered all the relevant and important bases, dealt with all the significant counter-arguments and taken your reader on a journey. As a rough rule of thumb, in a typical undergraduate essay of 2000 words you should be aiming to go through this process about three of four times. In postgraduate work you need to spend more time substantiating each move you make, so the average journal article might also contain three or four such cycles.
A variation on the “it’s not as simple as that” move is to ask yourself “how would I argue against myself?” or “how would I prove my own argument invalid or trivial?” Arguing against yourself is often one of the best ways of making your own argument more robust and complex. If you don’t go through this process before you publish then someone else may well subject you to it afterwards, and you won’t have the opportunity to get your rebuttal in first.
You might end up leaving half of your “not so simple as that” moves on the cutting room floor, but until you have been through the process of finding them you don’t yet know what the most important or exciting moves in your argument are.
Image: Yves Klein, Monochrome bleu sans titre (IKB 81), 1957, 100 x 200cm. Available at http://www.yveskleinarchives.org/works/works3_us.html
How do you go about constructing an argument for an essay, article or book chapter?