Building an argument

Unclear elements or connections

One common issue or concern is that readers might have trouble identifying all of the elements of an argument (claim, evidence, and analysis), or some of those elements might be missing. For example, instructors sometimes note that students don't have a claim. By this, they usually mean that students use sources to speak for them rather than expressing their own ideas. Students can address this by appropriately labelling what's evidence and prioritizing their own words. Similarly, sometimes the connections between claim and evidence can seem so obvious to the writer that they don't state their analysis, assuming that the audience will reach the same conclusion. Since a North American academic audience is interested in how you used the evidence to make your claim and why you think that information matters, it's important to conclude your argument by explaining your thinking for your reader. 

Insufficient explanation

Another problem is that students don't include enough commentary or discussion of their sources. They may rely on "dropped quotations," directly quoting sentences or larger chunks of text from another work and leaving it to stand alone without introducing or explaining it in their own words. Students sometimes do this because they think the evidence is self-explanatory and will "speak for itself." Your audience is interested in why you think this evidence is important to your argument, however. You can resolve this by rephrasing or explaining each piece of evidence so that it supports your claim directly. Without that intervention, something that is supposed to be evidence may look out of place.

Writers sometimes fall into logical traps in building an argument, and might rely on faulty reasoning. In the next section, you can learn more about fallacies and how to avoid them.