Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [127]
Whatever kind of evidence you’re using, the emphasis rests on how you use what you have: how you articulate what it means and how carefully you link the evidence to your claims. When you find yourself asking, “How good is my argument?” here are two working criteria from the chapter:
Am I oversimplifying the implications of my evidence?
Does my use of evidence go beyond mere corroboration of an overly general claim?
Another guiding principle, perhaps the chapter’s most important point, is to think with the evidence; keep it before you. If you start to move too far afield, return to the source, the evidence itself, to refresh your thinking.
GUIDELINES FOR REASONING FROM EVIDENCE TO CLAIMS
Learn to recognize unsubstantiated assertions, rather than treating claims as self-evident truths. Whenever you make a claim, offer your readers the evidence that led you to it.
Make the evidence speak. Explain how it supports the claim; offer your reasons for believing the evidence means what you say it does.
Use evidence to advance your claim, not just confirm it. Explore how the evidence does not fit the claim, and use what you learn to reshape the claim, making it more accurate.
Consider what counts as evidence in a given field or context, or as one of the Voices puts it, remember that “evidence itself is dependent upon methodology— that it’s not just a question of gathering ‘information,’ but also a question of how it was gathered.”
Most professors agree that evidence is never completely neutral, simply a matter of “the facts,” so you need to determine the slant—the principles of selection— that have produced this evidence. And as a corollary, try to gather evidence from more than one side of a topic.
* * *
Assignments: Reasoning from Evidence to Claims
Distinguishing Evidence from Claims. Take an excerpt from your own writing, at least two paragraphs in length—perhaps from a paper you have already written or a draft you are working on—and at the end of every sentence label the sentence as either evidence (E) or claim (C). For sentences that appear to offer both, determine which parts of the sentence are evidence and which are claim, and then decide which one, E or C, predominates. What is the ratio of evidence to claim, especially in particularly effective or weak paragraphs?
Find Examples of Using Authorities as Evidence. How are the authorities used? What other kinds of evidence appear in the piece? It might be interesting with this assignment to compare a piece of academic writing with a piece of nonacademic writing on the same subject.
Linking Evidence with Claims. Study a piece of writing, yours or something you come across in your reading. Locate the places where the writer explicitly explains the connection between the evidence and the claim. If you are studying your own writing, this exercise could be the basis of a revision in which you more fully explain the thought process that caused you to say your evidence means what you say it does.
* * *
Chapter 9
* * *
Analyzing Arguments
THIS CHAPTER addresses different schools of thought on the nature and purpose of argument along with a brief introduction to the rules of argument through which the linking of evidence and claims has traditionally been tested. The chapter ends with a glossary of the most common logical fallacies.
THREE VIEWPOINTS ON ARGUMENT
Formal Argument Analysis: The Syllogism and the Toulmin Model
Rogerian Argument and Practical Reasoning
Figurative Logic: Reasoning with Metaphors
Argument analysis and the definition of argument depend on what a person wants to know, and by what means. In some academic disciplines, the means are primarily quantitative. In most disciplines, the means are empirical in one way or another— based on observation.
As this chapter and later ones (especially Chapter 15, Forms and Formats Across the Curriculum) demonstrate,