Visualizing Argumentation

I want to share with you a book that is definitely worth exploring: Visualizing Argumentation: Software Tools for Collaborative and Educational Sense-Making.  Here's a link to the book reference page on Amazon.

The point of these tools is to support user decision-making with visual prompts that summarize the "pro" and "con" arguments on any given topic. In our McCulley/Cuppan consulting we've been huge advocates of this type of approach for years now. If you intend to make a regulatory submission document message-focused and issue-driven, then you have to create carefully crafted arguments.

Constructing arguments and at the same time understanding them is not easy, especially when working in a collaborative environment. A good argument in any research or regulatory report is a structure of messages linked in inferential or evidential relationships that supports your conclusions. Getting all the pieces and underlying propositions pulled together is not an easy task. Hence using visualization tools.

Visualization of arguments is well known in the research community as the most effective means to help foster understanding and improve critical thinking. The concept of argument mapping goes back to J. H. Wigmore and the approach of mapping remains a routine authoring tool in the legal community. I am suggesting it needs to become a more common tool in the pharmaceutical and medical device writing communities.

So back to the book: the book talks about an interesting software-based approach that is light years ahead of the tabular approach we have used for years.

Designing the architecture of the argument in development reports

Kirk Livingston, a teacher and a medical writer working largely in the medical device industry, as well as a fellow blogger at LivingstonContent, shared this comment on my previous post regarding poor rhetorical shaping of arguments in research reports.

There’s a lot of work involved with producing solid, well-reasoned conclusions. Can it even be accomplished as an “authoring team” or is it the work of an individual? Recent research about medical device companies in Minnesota suggests communication teams are chronically understaffed. So–who has time to come to the right conclusions? Thanks for the thoughtful post.

I agree there is considerable work that goes into producing solid, well-reasoned conclusions. I am certain the work can indeed be accomplished by an authoring team. The caveat here is, it can be accomplished as long as the team engages in truly collaborative authorship work practices and makes use of pre-writing planning tools to help shape the argument.

I am not so sure that writing teams are chronically understaffed. I think the real issue here is the limits of interest and skill that team members may have towards the task of writing. As I reflect on 17 years of work associated with the authorship of regulatory documentation, I am convinced adding numbers to the equation will have little bearing on the rhetorical qualities of any given document. Larger writing teams will likely yield only emotional comfort--the notion of safety in numbers.

Producing high quality documents is a function of knowing what you want the document to do for you, a sense of where arguments must be played out in a document, and what writing tools to use in order to get true collaboration and sharpen everyone's focus to achieve the objectives you want to document to support.

Producing high quality documents in the forum of pharmaceutical and medical device research requires understanding how to build out the red thread of logic in a research report. In pre-writing planning it starts with something as simple as building a table that is to be filled in by the authoring team. The table has three columns to be completed by the team:

Primary & Secondary Objectives | Conclusions | Key Data

You then have one row in the table for each objective.

The team's task is then is to build out conclusions about achievement of each objective and what data warrants that conclusion.  A simple but powerful writing tool that helps a team to lend considerable shape to the architecture of the argument that must be represented within a report.


Originally published on our Knowledge Management blog

Effective argumentation often missing from clinical research reports

Much of clinical research reporting associated with regulatory submission strategies must be persuasive writing. In particular, discussions about the significance of study findings and how these findings directly support development claims. To win the point of persuasion, such writing must follow conventions of well-framed arguments that avoid rhetorical flaws.

I've been doing quite a bit of work over the past two months with groups who are responsible for producing clinical research reports. Reflecting back on my work, I find that many involved in authoring or reviewing these documents do not recognize the elements that contribute to effective arguments. They often confuse summaries of study findings as being meaningful conclusions about the significance of research findings.

One of the common rhetorical flaws is that authoring teams are comfortable making broad generalizations and see such generalizations as being solid conclusions and part of well-framed arguments. Broad generalizations seldom stand scrutiny of regulatory review and the generalizations of truly difficult and controversial topics never withstand close scrutiny. Faulty generalizations are easy to spot. For instance terms like......"generally well tolerated;" "suggests relevant differences;" and "may be associated with" appear throughout discussion and conclusion sections of many clinical research reports.

Originally published on our Knowledge Managment blog