Constructing an Argument

Develop a Provocative Claim

Respectfully Consider Alternate Viewpoints

A helpful way to learn how to construct an argument is to study how others do so. Two sources to consult in this regard are book reviews and the “letter to the editor” section of newspapers, magazines, and journals. Writers in these sections of newspapers or magazines often engage in concise analyses of an argument put forth by a journalist or author.

In the case of book reviews, a useful exercise after reading a book on your topic is to write down its main claims, the evidence to support the claim, how the author addresses alternate explanations, and the author’s conclusion. Then, consult a book review and see how an authority on the subject interprets the author’s argument. Over time, you will get a feel for how to identify the parts of an argument and, by observing the quality of others’ arguments, how to construct a good argument yourself.

Two useful sources for quality book reviews include The New York Times online “books” section and the Website for Powell’s Books in Seattle. Each has links on their sites for book review databases that go back several years. On the New York Times’ Webpage (www.nytimes.com), there is a “Books” link under the “Arts” section. At the top of the books section is a search window for all book reviews since 1981.

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Once you’ve gotten to the stage where you’ve collected the evidence to support your claim, it’s time to think about how you’ll be communicating your ideas to an audience. You’ll want to consider not only the way in which you’ll convey your evidence, but also how you’ll bring your readers with you through your argument. Some styles will suit different argument structures better, and you should also consider the needs of your audience as well, and so you’ll want to think about your voice and organizational techniques simultaneously.

A narrative is simply a description of a sequence of events. Both fiction and non-fiction writers use story-telling devices not only to engage readers and communicate their values explicitly, but also to guide the reader through a complicated argument. The narrative choices you make as a writer will influence how readable your prose is, or even whether your hard-earned arguments are read at all. Writers may also employ narrative voices or techniques unintentionally, and so reading an argument as a narrative detective can offer new insights.

Narrative elements exist on several levels throughout a text:

• The narrative arc is the organizational structure that determines the sequential order of the argument. This may be determined in part by how you’ve chosen to answer your research question, and so bears thinking about early on in the research process. Arguments can be organized chronologically, thematically, in order of increasing complexity, or by using devices such as case studies or microcosms. You may also employ nonlinear structures that look less like roads and more like spirals or bull's-eyes.

• Signposts are elements that guide the reader through an argument. Much in the way that a driver uses signs on interstates, two-lane highways, and country roads to reach a destination, signposts can be present at different scales in an argument. Sentences, paragraphs, and entire chapters can all contain signposts; they guide readers through the ideas and the arc of a writer’s argument.

• Arguments exist within a greater meta-narrative. Sometimes referred to as “grand narratives,” meta-narratives are, literally, stories about stories. Essentially, they are a synthesis of the many stories told about a particular aspect of the past that, taken together, reveal a cultural paradigm. Think carefully about which of the broader narratives of environmental history your argument will become a part of. For example, if your argument involved exploring how the Industrial Revolution resulted in increased alienation between Americans and the natural world, you’d be participating in a “declensionist”  (decline-themed) meta-narrative about increasing environmental degradation over time.  

The facts: The Grand Canyon was formed over six million years by the Colorado River in rock nearly two billion years old. Pueblo peoples inhabited the region for hundreds of years, but were certainly not the first humans to settle in the region. Garcia Lopez de Cardenas is believed to have been the first European to have seen the canyon in 1540, and over three hundred years later John Wesley Powell made the first recorded expedition down the river. In 1919, it became one of the first national parks in the United States, largely due to the efforts of Theodore Roosevelt.

Colorado River in Grand Canyon at Mid-Day
Wikipedia Creative Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Canyon_midday.jpg

How would one go about telling the story of the Canyon? You don’t necessarily have to start at the beginning; while stories are often told chronologically, narratives can follow a number of different paths. You might consider beginning with the park’s creation in 1919, outlining its significance in the American conservation movement. You may choose to begin by imagining with de Cardenas as he first beheld one of the earth’s geological wonders, and his role in creating the mythology of the New World.

Chronological order isn’t essential to clarity in prose, but is a common template used in writing because it’s logical and easy to follow. It’s also predictable, which makes it less interesting, and may not be the best way to structure your argument, as with the Grand Canyon example above.

Deciding on what narrative arc to use can be intimidating early on. Create an outline before you begin writing, and use it to organize the evidence for your argument under the headings. Read through your outline often as it develops; use this to check if your narrative arc is easy to follow and is appropriate to your argument. Keep your outline close by during the writing processes; it’s your roadmap, and will help you keep a complicated structure clear. 

Narrative devices that help guide your readers are the signposts pointing the way through a complex argument. Tell a reader where you’re going before you begin the argument, much as you would consult a map before you get in the car (this roadmap is essentially your narrative arc, taken from your outline). Signposts guide the reader from point to point along you’re the map, and they help remind them where they’ve come along the way.

A Roman mile marker
WIkipedia Creative Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Campidoglio_-_il_miliarium.JPG

Sentences often contain signposts— a sentence opening with a word like but, however, until, or first is giving the reader a clue about the argument they’re about to read.

Metaphors, stories, or other devices can be used throughout a text to guide a reader through a complex argument, especially one that returns or cycles back to an early point. Readers will know that a key point or evidence is related to an earlier discussion much more readily if you signpost through the discussion. Literary techniques such as foreshadowing are also effective signposts.

The ways in which we write about nature can often be just as significant as what we’re saying; environmental historians grapple not only with the events of the past, but also the ways in which people experience and interpret those events. Environmental historians are interested not only in the relationship between humans and nature, but also how the ways in which scholars write about that relationship reflect their attitudes and values.

Remember that writers may or may not be aware of their narrative choices: in his essay Technology, Nature, and American Origin Stories, David Nye refers to a “master narrative” in American environmental history. Nye describes a narrative arc in which European colonists arrived in what to them was an Edenic New World (what he terms “first creation”), but then subsequently strove to improve it (“second creation”) by building farms, water mills, and estates.

Savannah Colony
Wikipedia Creative Commons, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/7e/SavannahColony.JPG

This meta-narrative became a lens through which Americans experienced nature; they told stories, interpreted those stories, developed a conservation ethic, and critiqued that ethic through this and other lenses. The rose-tinted glasses of early American land use were colored by Americans’ religious beliefs and cultural history, coming from the largely resource-depleted Europe to a land of seeming eternal plenty. Events like the extinction of the passenger pigeon and the Dust Bowl later made those glasses brown, however, and the narrative shifted to one of environmental decline and ultimately recovery.

The two passages below, discussed by William Cronon in his essay “Nature, History and Narrative,” illustrate the relevance of meta-narrative to environmental history. These were taken from two books that came out in 1979 about the Dust Bowl, and each has a very different narrative approach:

In the final analysis, the story of the dust bowl was the story of people, people with ability and talent, people with resourcefulness, fortitude, and courage….The people of the dust bowl were not defeated, poverty-ridden people without hope. They were builders for tomorrow.  During those years they continued to build their churches, their businesses, their schools, their colleges, their communities. They grew closer to God and fonder of the land….Because those determined people did not flee the stricken area during a crisis, the nation today enjoys a better standard of living.
---Paul Bonnifield, The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl was the darkest moment in the twentieth-century life of the southern plains. The name suggests a place – a region whose borders are as inexact and shifting as a sand dune. But it was also an event of national, even planetary significance. A widely respected authority on world food problems, George Borgstrom, has ranked the creation of the Dust Bowl as one of the three worst ecological blunders in history....The Dust Bowl…was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself [the] task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.
---Donald Worster, Dust Bowl

Dust storm in Cimarron County, Oklahoma
Wikipedia Creative Commons, http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d4/Dust_storm_CimarronCounty_OK.jpg

You should notice immediately that two authors writing about the same subject have drawn very different conclusions about the meaning of the Dust Bowl. Is the story of the Dust Bowl one of an ecological blunder, or of human resilience in the face of a natural disaster? Is the story about humans, or the landscape they inhabit, or both? Was it an “inevitable outcome” of human land exploitation, as Worster suggests, or did it inspire people to become “fonder of the land,” as Bonnifield writes?

The answer is complicated, because it depends not on whose sources (Worster’s or Bonnifield’s) are better, or who offers a better argument. Both Worster and Bonnifield have set out to tell a particular story about the Dust Bowl, and each is expressing a particular set of values. Each writer is employing a separate narrative to describe the same event; each is essentially telling a story about something that actually happened, but the stories they have chosen to tell are quite different. Each employs evidence, and some of that evidence may even be the same for both arguments, but the resulting narratives are quite different.

When reading your documents, consider the narrative choices being made by the writer, whether they are used intentionally or not. When constructing your own argument, consider what your narrative choices reveal about your intentions and values, and whether you would like those to become an overt part of your argument. Recall the currency example above; Mihm and Fiege were not only using different kinds of evidence to support their claims, but were telling different stories about the post-bellum American South. Coming from different disciplinary backgrounds, they are participating in two different meta-narratives about the past—post-war pastoral idealization in Fiege’s argument, and in Mihm’s case, the story about the racial tensions that would ultimately derail Reconstruction.

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You don’t have to sacrifice academic integrity in order to write lively and accessible prose. You can draw in your readers and maintain their interest in your argument by providing them with the incentive to keep reading. This is often most important in the opening paragraph of a piece of work, such as this discussion of the now-extinct passenger pigeon by Jennifer Price:

They say that when a flock of passenger pigeons flew across the countryside, the sky grew dark. The air rumbled and turned cold. Bird dung fell like hail. Horses stopped and trembled in their tracks, and chickens went in to roost. “I was suddenly struck with astonishment at a loud rushing roar, succeeded by instant darkness,” the ornithologist Alexander Wilson wrote after he encountered a pigeon flock along the Ohio River in the early 1800’s: “I took [it] for a tornado, about to overwhelm the house and everything around in destruction. “ Wilson sat down to watch the flock pass over, and after five hours, he estimated that it had been 240 miles long and numbered over two billion birds.

Notice Price’s choice to begin not with the facts — such as a reference to a 240-mile-long flock of billions of birds — but with a descriptive, story-telling device: “They say…” As readers, we are drawn into the facts with an appeal to our senses — rumbling and darkness — and even a little of the fantastic — bird dung falling like hail. Price could just as easily have begun with the bare facts about the bird, or even an emotional case for our interest in what has become an iconic extinction event. Price’s choice to open with an anecdote accomplishes the seemingly impossible by making us feel as though we were there, when in fact not even Price herself has witnessed the event. Without sacrificing journalistic integrity, she shows us that she’s drawing from primary documents rather than personal conjecture.

As the Price example demonstrates, it is important to hook your readers early with engaging prose. In addition, your introduction should convince readers that the rest of your argument is worth considering. If you turn off your audience early on, they may never look at the rest of your work, even if it has impressive insights. Think of times when you have put a book down in frustration and never resumed reading it. What was the reason for doing so? Did the author rely on jargon that was hard to understand? Did the author dismiss viewpoints that you held without adequately explaining why?

Now imagine times when you have been drawn into a book and could not put it down. Consider how the author Michael Pollan grabs his readers’ attention in his book The Omnivore’s Dilemma, both with the progression of chapter titles in his table of contents and with the very first paragraph:

What should we have for dinner?

This book is a long and fairly involved answer to this seemingly simple question. Along the way, it also tries to figure out how such a simple question could ever have gotten so complicated. As a culture we seem to have arrived at a place where whatever native wisdom we may once have possessed about eating has been replaced by confusion and anxiety. Somehow this most elemental of activities—figuring out what to eat—has come to require a remarkable amount of expert help. How did we ever get to a point where we need investigative journalists to tell us where our food comes from and nutritionists to determine the dinner menu?

Pollan starts off with a familiar question that most of us ask on a regular basis, and then moves on to make the claim that modern food supply systems have led recent generations to lose the connection to their food . As an investigative journalist, he spends the rest of his book visiting places involved in food supply, observing them, interviewing people at these locations, and sharing his insights about how our society got to that point.

It is important to note how Pollan uses narrative to structure his argument throughout the entire book. He chose to anchor his book around four meals that he purchased or prepared for family and friends. He then investigated how the food was grown and prepared in each case. This approach provides a storyline that links all of the book’s three sections and twenty chapters:

Table of Contents from The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan

Organizing the book around the four meals makes it more personal. He could easily have written a book about food supply chains in the United States without including his own prepared meals. Pollan’s gamble that such an approach would better reach his audience was most likely part of the reason for the book’s success. He established a connection with his audience early and then sustained that by telling an engaging story at the same time that he made a compelling argument. In a sense, he invited the reader to sit down with him to dinner and have a conversation about food.

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Consider the following excerpt from the introduction to David Laskin’s book, The Children’s Blizzard:

The blizzard of January 12, 1888, known as “the Schoolchildren’s Blizzard” because so many of the victims were children caught out on their way home from school, became a marker in the lives of the settlers, the watershed event that separated before and after. The number of deaths—estimated at between 250 and 500—was small….[but] it was traumatic enough that it left an indelible bruise on the consciousness of the region. The pioneers were by and large a taciturn lot, reserved and sober Germans and Scandinavians who rarely put their thoughts or feelings down on paper, and when they did avoided hyperbole at all costs. Yet their accounts of the blizzard of 1888 are shot through with amazement, awe, disbelief. There are thousands of these eyewitness accounts of the storm….The blizzard literally froze a single day in time. It sent a clean, fine blade through the history of the prairie. It forced people to stop and look at their existences—the earth and sky they had staked their future on, the climate and environment they had brought their children to, the peculiar forces of nature and of nature’s God that determined whether they would live or die.

1888 New York Times

List three sign-posts Laskin has deployed in this paragraph.

Based on this paragraph, construct a possible outline for the rest of Laskin’s book that illustrates narrative arc and argument structure.
What kind of meta-narrative do you think Laskin’s argument falls under?

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• Do learn the differences between primary and secondary sources.
  
• Do employ sign-posts to structure your writing and guide your reader.
  
• Do create outlines to help structure your arguments and determine a narrative arc.
  
• Do summarize arguments and evidence in your source notes.
  
• Do pay attention to alternative viewpoints, and address them respectfully and thoroughly.

• Don’t be afraid to use anecdotes or colorful prose!
  
• Don’t start your arguments with weak or unprovocative claims.

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New York Times, “Books,” www.nytimes.com/pages/books/index.html, Accessed November 7, 2008.

Powell’s Books, “Review-a-Day,” www.powells.com/review/all.html, Accessed November 7, 2008.

Rampolla, Mary Lynn. A Pocket Guide to Writing in History. 4th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2004

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Laskin, David. The Children’s Blizzard. New York: Harper Perennial. 2005.

Maher, Neil M. “Mark Fiege and Stephen Mihm On Bank Notes.” Environmental History, Vol. 13, No. 2, 351-359. 2008.

Nye, David. “Technology, Nature and American Origin Stories.” Environmental History, Vol. 8, No. 1, 8-24. 2003.

Price, Jennifer. Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America. New York: Basic Books. 2001.

Zuczek, Richard. State of Rebellion: Reconstruction in South Carolina. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. 1996.

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