Chapter 6 Notes Johnson
How Do We Support Arguments
Building Credibility
- Before most audiences will trust new information that we present,they must consider us or our arguments to be credible
- Credibility usually comes from three sources:
- Verification, borrowed form trustworthy sources. It relies on secondary sources, which means someone else has already analyzed or interpreted the evidence.
- Reputation, or what the audience already knows and thinks about the author before they start reading. Readers trust authors whom they recognize as experts.
- Presentation, which involves using a style thats suitable for your audience and purpose. Careful editing also demonstrates that we are about our writing and our audience.
Activating Reasoning or Logic with Evidence
- Audiences respond to evidence more reliably than they respond to credible and emotional appeals
- To understand why, we must consider the concept of reliability, which indicates how closely the results of investigation come together to form a pattern.
- We're most certain of what we can observe and count because observing and sounding don't seem like acts of interpretation
Quantitative Evidence
- To seek reliable conclusions, scholars develop carful methods of investigation that will yield similar results each time.
- Scholars who engage in quantitative investigation use Statistical Analysis to test the quality of their results,which kelps make statistics much more persuasive
Qualitative Evidence
- Don't think of evidence as quantitative data
- In literary studies, Data might be actual words from a novel, or known biographical information about an author
- Whatever their discipline, scholars are careful to design reliable and precise methods for collecting, analyzing, and reporting evidence
Link Evidence to Claims
- Such connections between a thesis and its support demonstrate linkages
- Linkages provide the bridge that connects the claim with the evidence
- One way to show your work is to transform our arguments from author centered writing, to audience centered writing
- Whats most important is to help readers see the logical pathway that guides our thinking
- Linkages elaborate all kinks of arguments because they make our assumptions more explicit
Scrutinize Your Linkages
- We typically evaluate linkages between evidence and claims according to two criteria: Relevance and Sufficiency
- Relevance, indicates the quality of the linkage
- Sufficiency, reflects the quantitative strength of the linkage
- In the sciences and social sciences, scholars carefully explain the relevance of he evidence by making clear distinctions between correlations and causation