More Thoughts on the Craft of Research, Warrants

I remain generally impressed with The Craft of Research, having read through another 5 chapters.  This material, which dealt with developing a solid ethos through a conversational, participatory tone, acknowledgement of other arguments/opinons, and warranting the relevance of reasons that may not obviously support my claims is described by the authors as "thickening the argument."

A few thoughts:

1. It was good to read this material now and have it mind as I research and sketch out the kind of arguments I intend to make.  I think it will good to review the material again before I sit down to write, but I think it will be more crucial to carefully review what I have written in conjunction with reviewing these chapters to evaluate how well  I have thickened my argument.

2. The book is fuzzy in its definition of warrants, but after reading the fairly lengthy chapter replete with examples, you grasp what they are talking about.  Flushing it out further in class was also helpful.  Basically the point is to beware of the assumptions on which I am relying in making my argument.  When an assumption is not obvious, or the connection between a reason and a claim is ambiguous, I need to make the assumption explicit.  This seems (and maybe is) instinctual in many cases, but I will need to carefully review what I have written to make sure I am not assuming things that are less than obvious to my readers.

3. Reflections on warrants. In my previous career as a tax attorney, I worked with some truly brilliant minds--specifically, the kind of brilliance that makes no error on Math SATs, the kind that can spontaneously generates elaborate economic formulae, and the kind that performs complex mathematical gymnastics with swift and nimble grace.  I have no such mind.  I could not keep up despite my efforts;  will and effort cannot transcend the natural limits of one's ability, and I came to accept that mathematics required the application of mental engines more crudely built in my head than in others.  Despite all this, I succeeded at my firm.  This success was driven mainly by my ability to write.  My value to the firm was that I could translate highly complex economic and tax nonsense into a language readily understandable and digestible by nonexperts such as judges, clients, and attorneys in other fields.  I was able to do this, because what I was trying to explain seemed so complicated and abstract, that I needed to find a way for it to make sense to myself.  So I would break things down, explain concepts from the bottom up, and not assume that any of the economic ideas involved were self-evident (because mostly, they were not to me).  My point is that I think what I was doing well was warranting.  But this may have seemed more necessary, more crucial to my writing because I was trying to express something that I struggled to make sense of.  I think warranting well, being clear without being patronizing, becomes more difficult when one works with a more familiar subject.  As much as I will try to warrant as I write, I think the best check on my writing will be another reader, preferably one less intimate with my topic.  In addition, a hidden benefit of my poor memory, is that if I put my paper down for a week and then return to read it, I may have forgotten my train of thought while writing.  This coldness may expose some of the gaps in need of bridges.