Aphorisms on Evidence

Defining Evidence: Evidence is the documented information that supports your argument—facts, dates, examples, quotations, descriptions, statistics, data, charts, graphs—the basis upon which you are making claims. 

Evidence Makes Truth: Evidence is what makes an argument true. 

Evidence is Visible: Derived from the Latin videre, "to see," evidence is associated with visibility. It is the things you see that lead you to an interpretation, and the things you show to others to support that interpretation. 

Detective and Lawyer: When working with evidence, a writer must be both detective and lawyer. As detective, she must comb through the messiness of the situation to determine what happened. As lawyer, she must figure out the best way to present the facts to convince an audience to except her interpretation of an issue. 

The Two Stages of Evidence: So evidence is the first element you deal with in the interpretation process. Working with evidence helps you figure out what you’re going to argue. But then, once you know what you want to argue, you have to think about evidence again, in a different way, to determine the best way to present supporting documentation for your argument.

Gathering and Presenting: A legal case can fall apart either because evidence wasn’t properly gathered or wasn’t properly presented. As a writer, you’ll need to develop good strategies for both gathering and presenting evidence. 

Gathering Evidence

Identifying a Text: The first step of writing a paper, whether it is a close reading or a research paper, is to identify your text – that is, to identify the idea, book, event, object, phenomenon, topic, etc. to be considered – and to specify the component parts of that text.

Identify, Collect, Organize: After you’ve identified your text, but before you’ve started to interpret that text, you must identify, collect, and organize all the evidence you plan to interpret. That tri-colon should be your rallying call at this stage in your research project: identify, collect, and organize.

Fit Argument to Evidence: Needless to say, it is crucial that you identify, collect, and organize your evidence before you attempt to interpret it, but – if you think about, say, past papers you’ve written – it seems we humans have an alarming tendency to do our interpretations first, and then to gather up the evidence that supports them later. Obviously this trajectory is backwards, and it usually results in a tunnel-visioned view of evidence that only sees or attends to the evidence that supports the preconceived interpretation, and sometimes results in an argument that can make the evidence say whatever the preconceived interpretation wants it to say.

Evidence Before Analysis: In short, don’t hazard an interpretation until you’ve clearly mapped out the evidence you’re planning to interpret. Of course, along the way of writing your interpretation, you may (and will) discover new evidence that you did not know about at the start of your interpretation, which is fine, but you do need to begin an interpretation by clearly demarcating the evidence to be addressed. Insight, analysis, interpretation, argument, etc. all depend on evidence.

Just the Facts: The purpose of identifying, collecting, and organizing your evidence is that you need to know what is true as exactly and as clearly as possible. Amidst all the opinions and arguments that furiously swirl around us, you need facts: “Just the facts, ma'am.” Your aim at this point in the research process should be to break down your text into the most simple and specific units of evidence possible. The next step in the research process will be to start considering how these units of evidence relate to each other – that is, to start interpreting why something happened or happens – but for now forget about “why” and focus on “what”: what is it that happened or happens? what are the facts? what is the evidence to be interpreted?

Textual and Historical Evidence: In the terms of my aphorisms on the elements of academic argument, the evidence you identify, collect, and organize will be your textual and historical evidence (set citational evidence aside for now: that comes later).

Quantitative and Qualitative Evidence: Both textual and historical evidence come in two kinds: quantitative and qualitative.

Textual Evidence: Textual evidence is the bits and pieces of your text that you plan to interpret, its component parts or specific instances or the facts that, when taken together, make up your text.

Quantitative Textual Evidence: Quantitative textual evidence consists of statistics and data, of numbers or “quantities” that represent evidence related to your text. These statistics may come from your own experiments, if you have conceived and conducted some sort of scientific study, or they may come from scholarly articles, reports, books, and so forth in which others publish the results of their scientific studies. Now is not the time to discuss exactly how you go about finding these statistics; right now, I only want to address what you should do with statistics once you’ve identified the ones that are relevant to your research project. After the identification of relevant evidence, of course, comes collection and organization. You will need to establish some sort of mechanism for recording and displaying your statistics: usually a spreadsheet that can be displayed as a graph or chart is your best bet.

Qualitative Textual Evidence: Qualitative textual evidence consists of not numbers and data but specific events, examples, cases, and instances that show your text at work in the world. These examples may come from your own experiences and observations, especially if you’ve done some sort of formal anthropological study, but for the most part these examples are going to be literary sources (books, plays, poems, essays) or journalistic sources (newspapers, television, the internet, and other media sources that report to us behaviors and events that are in some way remarkable). What you want to do at this stage in the research process is to identify, collect, and organize some examples of the issue you plan to interpret (exactly how many examples you’ll need will depend on the kind of writing you’re doing and its length). Again, I cannot now go into how exactly you go about finding good examples; I would like, however, to suggest one exercise you should do with your examples once you’ve found them.

Historical Evidence: Historical evidence is evidence that is, strictly speaking, outside the realm of your narrowly defined text, but evidence that is nonetheless relevant to an interpretation of that text. Like textual evidence, historical evidence can be either quantitative or qualitative.

Quantitative Historical Evidence: Quantitative historical evidence can be treated – identified, collected, and organized – just like quantitative textual evidence.

Qualitative Historical Evidence: Qualitative historical evidence usually comes in the form of the cultural history of a topic or problem. As you would do with a specific example, create a timeline that identifies, collects, and organizes as specifically as possible what happened in the cultural history of a given issue, in the various important events, discoveries, laws, innovations, etc. that went into the development of an issue. Again, as with an example, you should focus on who did what to whom when, where, and how. 

Timelines: The single best technique you can practice is to create a timeline for each example you’re working with, a timeline that describes what happened, and the order in which things happened, in as much detail as possible. When creating a timeline, you should focus on who did what to whom when, where, and how; that is, focus on who the various parties involved in your example are, what each of these parties did, when they did these things, where they did them, and also how they did them. Notice that there is no “why” in this list: why people did what they did in the ways that they did is a matter of interpretation, not evidence, and at this stage in your thinking process you don’t want uninvited interpretation leaking into your evidence.

Key Moments: Another good technique for gathering evidence is to identify the most important moment, passage, example, etc. for the issue. What evidence should you plan to spend some time really digging into deeply?

Presenting Evidence

Evidence Must Be Evident: Faith may be the evidence of things not seen, but no one will accept your argument on faith. Evidence must be visible. Your reader needs to be able to see your evidence in your essay. Evidence must be evident. 

Evidence in the Intro: The best way to start a paper is with some concrete evidence that then receives some quick analysis en route to the development of a question or problem that the essay will respond to.

Evidence in the Body: The most frequent location for evidence is the body of a paper. Your introduction frames the discussion; the body delivers the substantive support for an argument; and the conclusion considers its implications. Evidence will be interwoven throughout these three sections, but should be focused mostly in the body.

Orientation: One special kind of evidence is orientation, the little bits and pieces of background or framing information your reader needs in order to understand the larger areas of evidence you’re dealing with. Orientation often appears in the introduction of an essay to cover the journalistic questions—who? what? where? when? Orientation also appears in the body of an essay to remind your reader of generally known information that allows you to situate the less-common evidence you plan to analyze in depth.

Quotation, Summary, and Paraphrase: Qualitative evidence can be presented in three ways. Quotation exactly reproduces what someone said. Paraphrase puts someone’s statement in your own words. Summary concisely articulates someone’s main point(s). 

Evidence or Analysis?: Sometimes with paraphrase and summary the line between evidence and analysis gets blurry. Even if you’re putting something into your own words, as long as you’re simply describing it, that’s evidence. The moment you start to explain or infer from it, that becomes analysis.

Visual Evidence: There are many other ways to present evidence. A picture can be evidence - that is the visual equivalent of a quotation. 

Description as Evidence: A description of a picture in your own words can also be evidence - akin to summary - provided that you are describing its features, not interpreting them. Being able to describe something in your own words is an especially important skill in fields that deal with non-linguistic texts, such as musicology and art history.

Numerical Evidence: Tables of data are evidence. Charts and graphs visually representing data are also evidence. They are simply descriptions of some aspect of reality. You only shift over into analysis when you start to interpret the evidence.

Citation: Citation ensures the integrity of your evidence, and ensures that your evidence is coming from a reliable source. 

Visual Aids: Humans are visual creatures. You’re welcome to include visual aids such as pictures and charts. 

Illustration vs. Demonstration: As your essay starts filling up with all the various moves you need to make in academic writing, you may find that space becomes scarce. Often you’ll only have time to illustrate, not demonstrate, an analysis. To demonstrate is to prove exhaustively. In contrast, to illustrate is to provide a concrete example. Sometimes, you only have enough space to illustrate, not demonstrate, and analysis or argument.

Accountability to the Text: At the same time, your reader is going to keep you accountable to the text. If there’s relevant evidence in your text that you don’t address—whether it supports your argument or stands against it—your reader is going to be suspicious of your reliability as an interpreter.