Once you identify the claim or question that is central to your project, you'll probably find yourself wondering how to support it. The kinds of evidence that count as proof of a claim differ based on a number of things, including the type of claim being made and who your audience is. But the primary factor that shapes the kinds of proofs we use in arguments is our field (i.e. our academic or professional discipline). Consider how David Bartholomae describes this situation in his essay, "Inventing the University":
Every time a student sits down to write for us, he has to invent the university for the occasion--invent the university, that is, or a branch of it, like History or Anthropology or Economics or English. He has to learn to speak our language, to speak as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, evaluating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse of our community. Or perhaps I should say the various discourses of our community, since it is in the nature of a liberal arts education that a student, after the first year or two, must learn to try on a variety of voices and interpretive schemes--to write, for example, as a literary critic one day and an experimental psychologist the next, to work within fields where the rules governing the presentation of examples or the development of an argument are both distinct and, even to a professional, mysterious. (4)
This means that it's useful to reflect on how the text you intend to write should be shaped by the discipline you're in. Consider the following:
Perhaps the first question to ask yourself is whether you need a claim at all. For many disciplines, the question being asked is the primary focus at the start of the writing process (the articulation of which is still very related to one's discipline). The claim or thesis is delayed often delayed until proof is gathered that might prove or disprove a hypothesis being made. You might want to look at this SharkWrites blog post about different kinds of claims in argument, and then consider how the different kinds of evidence you collect will limit the kinds of claims you can build from that evidence. For instance, qualitative and quantitative methods of collecting data often lead to very different kinds of claims being made.
Different kinds of questions and claims require different kinds of evidence to support them, and there are many distinct methods of gathering evidence. Additionally, the same question can be answered in different ways. If you want to argue about what a novel means, for instance, you could do so by offering evidence gathered by talking to readers, looking at the text itself, or considering the historical context (in addition to other methods). What really matters is the appropriateness of the method being used to the question itself, which is something that you often have to argue for in your text. In other words, even after you present your question or claim and identify the method, you still have to argue that your approach makes sense, and that argument about the can only be made with some knowledge of what readers in your field will accept as evidence for your claims.
You likely have two audiences for a paper produced for an NSU class: 1. the members of your academic discipline and/or the public, and 2. your immediate audience of your classmates or instructor who will assess the text. Decisions about what claims to make and how to support them will be made in the context of those who will hear them, asking yourself what kind of claims you make require proof (and what kind of proof will suffice). For instance, making a general claim about how the pandemic has shifted many schools' attention to online instruction is a claim of fact that will likely be met with little resistance or skepticism. You can certainly still support this claim by pointing to local, national, or international evidence, and could modify your claim accordingly. But you'll probably find that other claims require proof in ways that such generally accepted claims do not. If you're arguing, for instance, that bilingual students benefited more from online instruction during the pandemic than monolingual students, most readers will expect more than your personal experience or belief to accept such a specific claim.
Disciplines are not just collections of information, but are distinct communities with different expectations that carry over to how we write and construct arguments. The better you understand the expectations of other members of your discipline, the easier it will be to write in ways that il contribute to your community. As Bartholomae suggests, the rules that govern these communities can change over time and may seem mysterious, even to those who follow them, but don't let this discourage you from using your knowledge of your community to better frame your arguments and guide your composing decisions
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