Most students arrive with a topic and believe it is a claim. “My research is about lithium supply chains” is a topic. It cannot be argued with, which means it cannot be defended, which means a committee has nothing to engage and will invent something instead.
The gap is not intelligence and it is not effort. It is that constructing an argument is taught in first-year composition and in introductory logic, and an engineering degree taken outside the United States contains neither. Nobody has ever shown these students the structure. They are then asked, at a proposal defence, to perform it under pressure.
Booth, Colomb & Williams, The Craft of Research, chapters 7–10. This is the book. It is short, it is written for exactly this gap, and chapters 7–10 are the argument core — claim, reasons, evidence, acknowledgment and response, warrants. The library has it.
Stephen Toulmin’s The Uses of Argument is the original source of the structure; you do not need to read it, but the vocabulary below is his.
None.
Take your own central finding and force it into one sentence:
I claim that X, because of Y, based on evidence Z.
Then do the hard part. Find the warrant.
A warrant is the unstated general principle that licenses the jump from your reason to your claim. It is almost never written down, and it is almost always where the argument actually breaks. “Costs fell in the model, therefore the policy is good” carries a warrant — that system cost is the right measure of good — which somebody will absolutely contest.
So: write the warrant out. Then ask whether a reasonable person in your field would grant it. If they would not, you have found what your paper actually has to defend, and you have found it while there is still time to do something about it.
Finally, list the three strongest objections to the claim. Not the easy ones.
One page: the claim sentence, the warrant stated explicitly, and three objections.
This replaces your writing entry for the week you do it. Submit it to that week’s WW assignment in Canvas — the same one you would have submitted anyway. It is not an extra piece of work on top of the log.
You do not submit anything to the milestone yet. When all five skills in M3 are done, submit the M3 — Reading and Reasoning assignment, which is just an index saying which week each one went in.