Created for you by Emily Doucet of Framing Devices.
One piece of advice I find myself giving again and again to my clients is this: your argument should be a specific claim about the materials—your evidence—described in your manuscript.
While this might seem like a revision-stage issue, I’ve found it often surfaces much earlier during the initial research phase.
If you’ve developed a set of research questions, chances are you’ve already begun collecting evidence, or at least have a sense of what you’ll need. But what I’ve seen again and again is that many writers jump straight from formulating questions to outlining their draft—skipping a crucial phase: cataloguing and analyzing their evidence.
This step is especially easy to overlook in the humanities, where methods are often more fluid than in the social sciences. But without a clear framework for evaluating your materials in relation to your questions, it becomes difficult to build a focused, defensible argument.
Taking time to organize, describe, and analyze what you’ve gathered—tagging, annotating, even just summarizing—can help you clarify what you know, what you assume, and what you’re really trying to say. In short, it’s the stage where your argument starts to emerge—not as a vague direction or general theme, but as a specific claim grounded in your materials.
To support this phase, try the evidence inventory exercise ****below—a simple, adaptable tool that helps you map your materials in relation to your research questions.
Click through each ▶ toggle to work through the inventory!