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Claim-Evidence Structures in Environmental Science Writing: Modifying Toulmin's Model to Account for Multimodal Arguments

This article develops a multimodal model for how claims and evidence work across linguistic, numeric, and visual modes in the professional writing of environmental scientists. I coded and analyzed two reports (Bacey & Barry, 2008; Levine et al., 2005) written by research scientists working for California's Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) by applying concepts from studies of argument, genre, and visual representations in science. The claim-evidence patterns show initial and summative claims as well as warrants being presented in linguistic forms; however, supporting evidence (i.e., data and backing) is found in numeric, visual, and linguistic forms. These findings highlight the need to extend Toulmin's understanding of claim-evidence relationships into a more robust multimodal model.