Write for Your Life by Charles Wheelan

Author:Charles Wheelan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Perhaps you believe that Lebron James is a better player than Michael Jordan was. If so, you are going to have to put some data against that assertion. I believe Jordan was better, and here is my evidence: Lebron is 4–6 in NBA Finals series, whereas Jordan was a perfect 6–0.

The information you use to validate your arguments needs to come from a source the reader will consider authoritative. If we are still evaluating NBA players, The National Association of Basketball Writers is a better source than “a loud guy I met at a local sports bar who seems to know a lot about basketball.” An oncologist at a major university hospital is more credible with regard to cancer risks than a blogger who has watched a lot of YouTube videos.

A credible source must also be objective, meaning that the party you are leaning on for corroboration does not have a stake in the outcome of what is being discussed. When it comes to climate change, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body responsible for assessing climate-related science, is a better source than ExxonMobil, since the latter has a financial incentive to downplay the harms associated with fossil fuels. During the 1980s and early 1990s, an organization called the Council on Tobacco Research consistently cast doubt on the public health consensus that smoking causes cancer. Who or what was this seemingly august group pushing back on decades of peer-reviewed research? Remarkably, the Council on Tobacco Research was an organization funded by the tobacco industry with the mission of promoting tobacco use and protecting the industry from regulation. No reasonable person, let alone professional journalists, should have considered this entity a legitimate source, yet their official-sounding reports and “experts” sowed confusion on the harms of smoking. When the major American tobacco companies entered into a legal settlement with forty-six state attorneys-general in 1998, the Council on Tobacco Research was disbanded as part of the agreement.

A good source is knowledgeable, honest, and objective. Most important, the reader needs to think, “Yes, I believe that.” At the same time, you are trying to build your case as efficiently as possible. Just as the best building materials are strong but light, the best supporting evidence is compelling but concise. Here is the clever way The Economist documented the claim that many Americans are moving out of urban areas as a result of Covid: “MoveBuddha, a relocation website, says that searches for places in New York’s suburbs are up almost 250% compared with this time last year.”6 In one sentence, that factoid supports the assertion that the pandemic caused a major shift in where people are choosing to live.

In an article in The Atlantic provocatively entitled, “How American Health Care Killed My Father,” David Goldhill describes how infections acquired in the hospital are deadly but preventable. Here is how he compellingly expresses the scale of that problem: “My dad became a statistic—merely one of the roughly 100,000 Americans whose deaths are caused or influenced by infections picked up in hospitals.

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