Week Three 10/7 Chapter 9/10 Notes

Reading Notes:

Chapter 9: Assembling Reasons and Evidence

Offer plausible set of reasons, in a clear, logical order, based on evidence the readers will accept.

Make a storyboard, and read just the reasons across to see if it makes sense:

Introductory Claim - Reason 1 - Reason 2 - Reason 3 - Reason 4 - Conclusion

Evidence 1 - Evidence 2 - Evidence 3 - Evidence 4

Really skeptical readers just never give up.  Neither should we.  Don’t let them question your validity.

Be as close to the primary source as possible, reliability of evidence is paramount.

Evidence should be accurate, precise, sufficient, representative, and authoritative. (Readers also expect evidence to be relevant.)

- Report evidence accurately.  Even when you use questionable data, you can acknowledge its dubious quality, which shows you to be cautious, self-critical, and thus trustworthy.

- Be appropriately precise depending on your field.  Nanoseconds for physicists, millenia for paleontologists.

- Provide sufficient representative evidence.  Show enough evidence to be representative of the full range of variation of what’s available.

Chapter 10: Acknowledgements and Responses

If you only plan your argument around claims, reasons, and evidence, your argument will seem ignorant and dismissive of other people’s views.  You must respond to their predictable questions/objections.

Question of intrinsic soundness: clarity of your claim, relevance of your reasons, quality of your evidence

Question of extrinsic soundness: considering alternatives, different ways of framing the problem, evidence you overlooked, what others have written on your topic

1. Why do you think there’s a problem at all? What are the costs or consequences in this situation?

2. Why have you defined the problem as you have?  Is it conceptual or pragmatic?  Maybe the problem involves not the issue you raise but another one.

Questioning your solution:

3. What kind of solution do you propose?  Does it ask me to do something or to understand something?  Does it match the problem exactly?  Are they both practical or both conceptual?

4. Have you stated your claim too strongly?  I can think of exceptions and limitations.

5a. Why is your conceptual answer better than others?  It contradicts our well-established knowledge.

5b.  Why is your practical solution better than others?  It will cost too much, take too much time, or create new problems.

Note where your argument looks weak but is not.  You can defuse concerns about it easily.

The most common and toughest objection is “you need more evidence.  One data point (quotation, number, anecdote) is not proof.”

• plausible charges of weaknesses that you can rebut

• alternative lines of argument important in your >eld

• alternative conclusions that readers want to be true

• alternative evidence that readers know

• important counterexamples that you have to explain away

Candidly acknowledge questions you can answer and respond that

- the rest of your argument mroe than balances the falw

- while the flaw is serious, more research will show a way around it

- while the flaw makes it impossible to accept your claim fully, your argument offers important insight into the question and suggests what a better answer would need