The Structure of Long-Form Argument
And some tips on writing introductions
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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Blake Snyder’s “Save the Cat,” a book about writing screenplays.
I’ve never written a screenplay. It’s not the kind of writing I specialize in. But I would still insist that this is a great book for anyone interested writing long-form argument.1 And that’s because Snyder does three things incredibly well:
He understands the genre he’s writing about.
He knows how to approach writing structurally.
He knows how to think rhetorically.
I watch a lot of movies. But until I read Snyder’s book, I’d never thought about how screenplays are structured or why specific genre conventions evolved to be the way they are.
According to Snyder, every three-act screenplay has fifteen beats:
The opening image
The theme
The set-up
The catalyst
The debate
Break into act two
The B story
Fun and games
The midpoint
Bad guys close in
All is lost
Dark night of the soul
Break into act three
The finale
The final image
I want to apply this structural approach to long-form argument.
Long-form arguments often have a similar three-part structure (book-ended by an introduction and conclusion) and there are certain “beats” writers usually need to hit to be successful with an audience. They include:
The introduction
The thesis statement
The fundamental premise
The stakes or impact
The mapping statement
The site or object of analysis
The through line
The evidence
The citations
The takeaway or payoff
The conclusion
The bibliography
There are many theorists who reject some or all of these genre conventions and still write successful long-form arguments. But these writers are successful because they’re doing it deliberately. They’re making informed decisions to reject specific genre conventions to achieve some other goal.
If you understand the “generic” structure of a long-form argument, you’ll be better positioned to make these kind of informed, deliberate decisions about how you use (or reject) genre conventions in your own writing and theoretical work.
I’ll be writing about each of these beats later this summer, but today I’m going to focus on the introduction.
Writing an Introduction
In long-form argument, a good introduction accomplishes a few different goals:
It introduces readers to the topic. This includes identifying the stakes of your argument by explaining why readers should care.
It establishes your credibility. The introduction is a first impression. You’re giving the reader a glimpse of what’s ahead and signaling that you’re the right person to guide them through the topic.
It gives the reader a glimpse of your writing style. It should clearly demonstrate the tone, style, and voice you’ll be adopting in the rest of the text.
It gives the reader a reason to stick around. You can tell a story, identify a problem, explain what you’re offering, use humor, or employ some other strategy, but you have to convince the reader to keep reading.
It sets up your conclusion. This doesn’t mean giving the reader an exhaustive list of everything you’re going to prove. It means establishing something in your introduction that you can circle back to in your conclusion.
If you’re struggling to write an introduction, I have a few suggestions that might help:
Write the introduction and the conclusion together. The introduction and the conclusion are fraternal twins. They’re not identical, but you can tell that they’re related and were born at the same time.
Write the introduction and the conclusion after you’ve finished drafting your argument. Writing an introduction to something that doesn’t exist yet is like trying to introduce two people you’ve never met.
Besides, there’s no way to know how much your argument will change until after you’ve written it. When people hand me introductions that feel disconnected from the argument they’re making, it’s usually because they wrote their introduction before they knew what they wanted to say.
I hope this helps you get started with your writing.
Good luck!
By long-form argument, I’m referring to any argument longer than 1-2 pages. This would include books and book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, nonfiction essays, and long blog posts or video essays.
Long-form argument tends to focus on issues that require a lot of explanation. As a result, writers in this genre have developed conventions for helping their primary and secondary audiences navigate the twists and turns of an unfamiliar argument. The more complicated and abstract your argument, the more important this signposting becomes.