You are writing an essay, journal article, book or thesis chapter and you want to present a smart, well-crafted argument that will both convince your reader of the point you are making and also strike them as authoritative and expertly constructed. How can you write such an argument? Here is a four-stage structure that can help you inform and convince. You can riff on it and adapt it to your needs, but it’s a solid starting point for presenting clear and compelling arguments at any level of academic writing.
1. Signpost your point
There are few things more frustrating for a thesis examiner or essay marker than to get to the end of a paragraph and think “I’ve no idea why I am being told all this. What argument is this paragraph making?” A great way to avoid this is to signpost your arguments as you begin to make them. There is no need for a clunky “In this paragraph I am going to argue that…” or “my main point here is that…”. Don’t sound an elaborate fanfare about it; just make sure it’s clear, in the first sentence of the new argument’s first paragraph, what it is you’re trying to show. Think of it as a courtesy to the reader. You are letting them know why they should spend their time reading the paragraph that follows, and you’re helping them to understand where your argument is headed. I often describe this to students as taking your reader by the hand or leading them through your argument like a tour guide.
2. Show your working
Make sure that every argument you make rests on clear evidence or inference of one sort or other. If you’re in literary or philosophical studies this might be in the form of a quotation or a broader evocation of your primary text. It might be a thought experiment, some data or statistics, or it might rest on the authority of leading secondary sources. One way or another, make sure that your reader doesn’t have to take your argument on trust: force them to agree with you by showing them why you’re correct.
People vary in the extent to which they use direct quotations. I like them for two reasons: 1) by and large working with direct quotations in my writing keeps me honest and helps convince the reader that I am not twisting the text I’m writing about, and 2) my readers are probably more interested in my primary text than in my own thoughts, so I want to dose them up by giving it neat, not diluted through my commentary and paraphrase.
If you quote, don’t expect your reader to do the work of figuring out how your quotation is relevant to your argument. Sandwich your quotations in the following way:
- A sentence introducing the quotation, framed to show how it is relevant to your argument.
- The quotation itself.
- A sentence showing the implications of the quotation for your argument: how it proves the point you are making, how it moves your argument forward, and/or any relevant details (words, arguments, constructions) in the quotation to which you want to draw your reader’s attention.
Without the lead-in and lead-out sentences your killer quotation is like a beached whale: superficially impressive, but isolated and impotent.
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3. Explain your point
This is where you write in more detail about the argument for which you have just supplied textual evidence. Why is it interesting/relevant/important/controversial for what you are arguing? Develop your argument using questions like “what if it’s not as simple as that?” or “so what?”
4. Create a smooth transition to the next point
As you leave one point, make sure that you show how it leads on to the next turn in your argument. The series of points in your argument should be like beads on a string, not like marbles in a box. In other words, they come in a specific order and that order is important. Each point leads on to the next, and each builds upon the one(s) before. If you were to leave out any one point, it would create a hole that none of your other points could fill. Your argument, in other words, should be cumulative.
Do you have a systematic way of presenting arguments in your writing? What is it?
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