Academic Writing Talk Episode 8: How to Make an Academic Argument

Transcript: Welcome back to the Writing Talk podcast. My name is Aure Schrock and I'll be your guide to academic writing today. In each episode of this podcast, I'll talk about a specific writing problem encountered by academic authors and how to solve it. Today we're going to be talking about what an academic argument is and some pitfalls that academic authors fall into when trying to make arguments in books, articles, or conference papers. And it's okay if you've never really thought about this before! I don't think I even thought about it very much before my sophomore year of my PhD program. I got feedback on an article draft I was working on that was a class paper. The professor said, this is all interesting material, but how are you bringing it together in an argument? I'm really not going to understand the importance of what you're writing about in unless you make one.

I had to take a step back and think about what made for a good argument. And one of the models I reached to is what's just generally called the Toulmin model of argumentation, named after Steven Toulmin. And really briefly, he really stipulated that an argument is more than just a set of claims, you actually need data, a claim, and a warrant that connects the claim. So for example, and here I'm just drawing on an article by a scholar named Joan Karbach, who followed up on Toulmin's model to show how it'll be used. She gave the example of the data itself would be smoke is pouring from Anne's bedroom, the claim would be Anne's bedroom is on fire, and the warrant, which is smoke is a primary sign of fire. So this is a very basic example because when we see smoke, we generally know where there's smoke, there's fire.

But think about it in an academic context. When you're making an argument, you're interpreting data from the past that has been either produced by you or someone else in a particular way. So you actually have to tell the reader, particularly through the warrant, how they should interpret that data, and that will support the veracity of your claims. When you're writing and you intend to publish for an academic journal or press, you really can't just present the data and hope that the reader understands the connection between the data and the claims you're making. You really have to walk the reader through what that warrant is and how it connects the data with your claims.

This may look different depending on whether you're a quantitative or qualitative researcher. If you're a qualitative researcher, you may have to go in and add contextualization and interpretation to data like quotes from interviews, because that's information the reader needs to understand how that data leads to the conclusions that you're advancing in the piece of writing. Similarly, if you're a quantitative scholar, don't just present your results and drop them on the floor. Go back in the conclusion and discussion to give meaning to and enrich your findings because that's how the reader is going to understand why your research is important. And if when you're writing your paper, you find that the warrant is a little bit flimsy, maybe it means that the conclusions you're drawing are not true to the data, or maybe you just need to collect a little bit more data to make the points you need to make. Remember that you can adjust the warrant, but also the claims and the data.

So when you're writing for academic publications, there's a couple things you should probably avoid. You should avoid just stringing together claims with no warrant at all, because that's just going to be read by the reader as a set of ungrounded statements. Instead, make the warrant really clear. Include sound interpretations of previous research, not just what they did, but how and why and how it changes the way you've done your research. I'd also avoid making generic claims. As someone who specializes in interdisciplinary technology scholarship, I can't tell you the number of times I've read papers that begin with a claim like “technology is moving faster than ever before.” Such blanket ideas may be helpful for publications in lay journals, but in academic contexts, you really want to make specific claims with scholarly purpose. In general I'd also avoid using data from popular media wherever possible, and organizing your paragraphs around the argument you want to make. Strong paragraphs are strong because they support your argument and you're really moving back and forth from the scholarship of others, your data and the claims that you're making in a given paragraph.

Once I was able to recognize what an argument was and how to improve my argument in my academic writing, that actually helped me out so much. And I was able to secure publications for articles and books that probably I wouldn't have otherwise. And in the process, focusing on your argument makes your writing a little bit more lively. Academic writing shouldn't just be a list of facts, and it shouldn't just be a list of bold claims that are fairly unsupported. These are sort of the stereotypes of academic writing that we want to avoid. And if you're not sure if you're making an argument correctly, you can actually use the Toulmin model to analyze the argument you're making in your current draft. Once you reveal it, you can actually be in a better place to make evaluations about how to improve it, perhaps by improving your data, perhaps by including more specific warrants or perhaps by clarifying your claims.

So that does it for this episode of the Writing Talk podcast. Hope you found it helpful. And as always, if you have any questions or want to work with me on a specific writing project, feel free to find me@indeliblevoice.com. And if you, yes, you have a question about academic writing, feel free to ask it using the form links on my podcast page on my website. Hope you tune in next time, and thanks so much for listening.