Evaluating others’ arguments about aspects of the management field and developing your own convincing argument are central to academic discourse. These are things that expert management researchers are good at doing, as you will have noticed from your reading or from listening to academic presentations or lectures. Despite your best efforts to be a critical audience, it is likely that you will find yourself easily convinced of others’ claims when they present their argument justifying those claims so persuasively. On the other hand, you are likely to experience how easily others find things to criticise in what you thought was a reasonably convincing argument of your own. Arguing convincingly is clearly a complex skill that takes time to learn. So what lies at the heart of this power of persuasion? And how can you speed up the development of your power to argue persuasively, so characteristic of experts in the field? 

Studying this key topic should help! Learning activities explore how an argument amounts to more than just having an opinion about the social world, and what is needed for an argument to be as convincing as you can make it for the critical academic audience who read your work for assessment or hear your presentations. Examples of how more or less expert researchers develop their argument in their written work offer you insights about the contribution that different parts of a written text can make to rehearsing and developing an overall argument.