Supporting Claims with Evidence

However interesting your claim might sound, you won’t seal the deal with the reader until you marry it up, in some sense, with a body of evidence. Which type of evidence speaks most effectively to your claim? How will your readers assess the credibility and appropriateness of quotations, statistics, images, and maps? For each type of evidence, the conventional rules and methods vary, as do the classic pitfalls that lie in wait for beginners. Warrants authorize the move from a certain type of evidence to a certain kind of conclusion. The chapter includes four separate sections with this in mind, concerning verbal, numerical, visual, and spatial warrants respectively.