There’s a verb test I use in the journal article preparation workshop. Take the sentence where you say what your paper does, and look at the main verb. If it’s “explores,” “examines,” “traces,” “outlines,” or “describes,” you’ve written a description of a project. If it’s “argues,” “reveals,” “demonstrates,” “challenges,” or “complicates,” you’ve written a claim about a finding. Description says you’re still looking. Argument says you’ve already found something.
This is related to The so-what problem but operates at a more specific level. The so-what question asks why the work matters. The verb test asks whether you’ve committed to a position yet. A lot of academic writing floats between the two: it has a sense that something matters without quite saying what was found, or it gestures at a finding without showing how it changes anything. The shape that tends to work is: “This paper uses X to argue Y about Z.” X is your project or dataset. Y is your claim. Z is the broader concept your claim addresses. “This paper uses computational sentiment mapping of Victorian letters to argue that the ‘stiff upper lip’ was a performative myth, revealing a hidden culture of emotional radicalism.” That sentence is doing three things at once and all three are argument.
The version of this that comes up most in Digital Humanities work is the move from technical description to analytical claim. “We used a Random Forest classifier” is not an argument. “The success of the Random Forest model suggests the variables are non-linearly related, challenging previous assumptions about X” is. The build process, the methodology, the design choices: these are evidence, but only when framed as evidence for something. Otherwise they’re a log of what happened.
What I’ve noticed is that the shift from description to argument is uncomfortable for a lot of writers because it requires committing to a position that could be wrong. Description is safer. “This paper examines…” can’t really be disputed. But that safety is the problem. If your reader can’t argue with you, they also can’t be persuaded by you, which means the writing isn’t doing what academic writing is supposed to do. A proposal that describes instead of argues has exactly the same problem: no commitment, nothing to evaluate, no reason to fund it.