Split an argument into claim, evidence and warrant, and find its weakest point.
Find the last message that tried to change your mind, whether an email from your manager, a post in a group chat or an ad, and keep it in front of you while you read. People try to change your mind every week, at work and online. Some of those messages are right, and the skill this course builds is telling which ones quickly, without becoming someone who argues with everything.
Most persuasive statements bundle three things together: a claim, the evidence for it, and the link between them. Arguments are much easier to judge once you separate the three parts.
Take one Monday with four messages. A colleague complains that the new process is slowing the team down. A property agent messages to say prices in an estate will climb once the MRT line opens. A friend forwards a post saying their cholesterol fell after a month on some supplement. Your manager announces that customers want a cheaper plan.
The claim is the thing you are being asked to believe or do: the process is slowing the team, prices will climb, the supplement lowers cholesterol, customers want a cheaper plan. A claim on its own is just an assertion, however confident the speaker sounds, so start by pinning down exactly what it says.
The evidence is what the claim rests on: numbers, examples, an experiment, someone's experience or a report. Its quality varies enormously. One customer complaint and a survey of five hundred customers (also invented) are both evidence, but they do not carry the same weight, so judge how good the evidence is as well as what it is.
The warrant is the reason the evidence is supposed to support the claim. The term comes from the philosopher Stephen Toulmin. People rarely state the warrant out loud, and weak arguments tend to hide there. The agent points out that prices rose near other new MRT stations. The unstated warrant is that this estate will follow the same pattern, and testing it means checking whether the other estates are a fair comparison.
Writing the warrant down makes the gaps visible. In your friend's post the claim is that the supplement lowers cholesterol, the evidence is one person's test results before and after, and the warrant is that the supplement caused the change. Once you write that out, other explanations appear: a change of diet in the same month, a first test taken after a week of hawker suppers, or a reading that would have drifted down anyway. None of this proves the claim false. It shows the evidence cannot carry the weight being put on it.
The habit is three questions: what exactly is being claimed, what does it rest on, and why should that evidence lead to that conclusion. You can run the check silently in a meeting in a few seconds. Claims often turn out vaguer than they sounded, so follow up with how much, measured how, and compared with when. Your manager's line about a cheaper plan is a good place to try those three.
Keep two cautions in mind. First, a weak argument does not make the claim wrong. Your colleague may have only one example of the new process causing delays, and the process may still be slowing the team down. A gap tells you what to check next and leaves the answer open. Second, apply the same test to your own arguments, especially the ones you feel strongly about. The arguments you never question are usually the ones that agree with what you already believed.
Toulmin's full model has more parts than claim, evidence and warrant. Qualifiers are words such as "probably" and "in most cases" that limit a claim. Rebuttals name when the claim would not hold. Good arguments include both, and a claim that admits its limits is usually more trustworthy than one that admits none. The module on probability explains why.
Your task: find one persuasive message you received this week, at work or online. Write down the claim in one sentence, list the evidence offered, and write the unstated warrant that connects them. Then write one question that would test whether the warrant holds.
Pick one persuasive message you saw this week. Write down its claim, its evidence, the warrant it leaves unstated and one question that tests that warrant.
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