How to build a strong argument in 3 short steps (and how not to)
The ability to make a strong argument is one of the most sought-after skills in the modern British workplace, which isn’t surprising considering that 8 out 10 jobs in the UK economy are in the services sector.
Are you convinced? I can prove my statistic about jobs is true if that’s what’s eating at you. Maybe you think it’s a problem that our economy is so reliant on the services sector in the first place and that’s why I can’t persuade you, which is a perfectly valid point, but a different conversation from the one I started. Maybe you just need a survey of British employers confirming they agree with me to tie you over, which would inject some expert opinion into this conversation, but still wouldn’t explain why I was right — or wrong.
Still not buying it? Maybe I haven’t added enough rhetorical flair to my argument — it’s not exactly poetic — or told you a compelling story that ‘tugs on your heart-strings’ and makes you really want to believe me. Sure, I could always draw on my experience as a public relations operative and a political activist to manipulate you into agreeing with me, though I generally find this works less well when your audience is an Operations Director who needs to turn your Churchillian oratory into a plan they can actually implement. Besides, if someone later asked you why you agreed with me, would you really want to admit it was because I made you feel warm and fuzzy inside or would you prefer to have a good reason?
Maybe, just maybe, the reason you’re not sold yet is because my argument isn’t strong enough. And if anyone tries to accuse you of being an irrational fact-denier just because I have included an accurate statistic in my claim, ask them to explain why that statistic proves my claim to be true — because that is what’s missing.
How we structure arguments
Now that I make my living training people to plan, deliver, and analyse oral arguments in the context of live public debates, I get to hear a lot of different people make a lot of different arguments on a lot of different subjects in many different styles. Yet one thing that remains curiously similar when I first hear them speak is how many of them structure their arguments in exactly the same way I just did now, which looks a little something like this:
This is understandable as whenever we make assertions about things we believe to be true (our conclusion), the first thing we normally hear back is: ‘what evidence do you have to back that up’? This approach is fairly common too. I see people doing the same thing whether they are Oxbridge educated Directors of FTSE 100 companies, self-starting entrepreneurs with few academic credentials, or specialists who have devoted their careers to a single discipline, be it medicine, education, technology, or something else.
The missing link
So, how do we fill the gap that was stopping you from agreeing with my opening argument (unless you already believed it to be true — in which case, welcome to the wonderful world of confirmation bias)? Put simply, we explain why that statistic proves my claim to be true by applying it in a relevant example from an area of life that my audience have all experienced to some degree — in this case, the world of work.
Here’s what it looks like now with the missing link included:
The ability to make a strong argument is one of the most sought-after skills in the modern British workplace, which isn’t surprising considering that 8 out 10 jobs in the UK economy are in the services sector. These are jobs that many of us do, like finance, sales, marketing, law, and consultancy where business performance depends on the quality of advice we give and how well we persuade other people to take it. The ability to make a strong argument is central to doing these things well and hence a highly valuable skill.
The structure of this argument still looks pretty similar to the last one, but with one crucial difference:
The difference between data and evidence
Why did I change the word ‘evidence’ to ‘data’? To make the point that data is not evidence until it is marshalled by analysis in support of a specific conclusion.
Take the question of female representation on company boards. Supporters of the current system of voluntary quotas — setting a minimum number of women that FTSE 100 companies must appoint to their boards — may claim it has worked because the number of women serving on boards by 2015 hit the target of 25%.
Opponents of quotas, however, could easily use the same figure to show the system was failing if they could demonstrate that companies were appointing more women on a tokenistic basis to comply with government targets and not actually addressing the causes of under-representation themselves.
As you can see in the example above, without that analysis, the same piece of data can be used to prove multiple conclusions — especially when those conclusions have not been clearly defined.
So what?
I already established earlier that there are other ways to persuade you to agree with me (that are less ominous than how that sentence sounds), so why should we care about doing it this way?
First of all, it means your audience doesn’t have to just trust that you are telling them the truth, but can reach the same conclusion for themselves, using their own experiences, which helps insulate your argument from attempts to attack the accuracy of your data or the credibility of your source. So, if it turns out the services sector actually only accounts for 70% of jobs and not 80%, my argument won’t fall apart because of it.
Second, it makes your argument easier to understand and relate to, which is the whole reason speaker trainers emphasise the importance of telling stories and using everyday examples. You still need the data to prove your point, but that won’t matter if the message isn’t getting through in the first place.
Third, it guards against cognitive bias creeping into your argument and misleading your audience, which will end either with you being called out and losing all credibility or with your audience being misled. Our biases are more likely to go unchecked if our reason for using a fact or statistic is that we trust it is true because it came from a credible source, instead of actually showing what makes it true. The same goes for quoting an expert without explaining how they reached the same conclusion. We value experts for their expertise, not for celebrity endorsements, and this should be no exception.
My conclusion
The best test of a strong argument is how well your audience can make it to someone else after they’ve heard it from you. A year’s worth of focus group data from over 20 public debates has consistently shown that the team whose argument all audience members could easily sum up in a single sentence was more likely to win. This is because it is easier to know how you feel about something you clearly understand and to support it if it is expressed in words and peppered with examples you can easily relate to in your own life.
