00:00: Now, let’s go to the main issue now, which is the writing of a scientific argument. First of all, let me begin with a caveat. Your audience matters when thinking of a topic to write about. So that’s why when writing a scientific article, your argument, you should not overlook your readers, your audience.
00:31: Second, you must note that scientific writing is different from descriptive writing. Descriptive writing is merely reporting facts or providing a background setting, which we normally do in the introduction. But that’s not all it takes to do scientific writing or a scientific argument. While the background setting may be useful for a scientific argument, you have to go further. And because scientific writing is about persuasion, convincing your audience, crafting a scientific argument involves making claims and providing convincing evidence for these claims.
01:03: Scientific writing is argumentative. You take a position or you look at somebody else’s position and you are trying to counter or refute it or to support it. Third, the selection of appropriate facts or data to tell your story. This entails how to use facts or data in a logical way to support your claims. The question is, which data is relevant for which aspect of your work? What techniques are you going to use to analyse the data or present the data?
01:33: How are you going to interpret the data? What are you going to anchor your data interpretation on? That brings us to the theoretical framework, which you will learn about later in this course. These are all interconnected. And then the analysis. What are you going to use? How relevant is it? How accurate? I mean, how suitable is it for your argument? And then the justification. In fact, at every stage of your work, at the higher degree, you must provide justification so that your audience will be able to follow.
02:04: You will be able to select and present your material in a way that tells your story by trying to persuade the audience about the validity of your claim. How valid is your argument based on your data? Look at the analysis. Look at the application. Is there any connection? Is any of this valid? Are they valid to make your claim credible?