CH7-10 give useful guidelines on how to formulate your arguments in a convincing way, make significant claims without falling into the trap of complete certainty, strengthening your arguments with sufficient evidence, and acknowledging limitations of your arguments. Much like the first few chapters, it served as a succinct reminder of how to write good research arguments, bundling everything that we may have picked up in our past education and/or careers.
I especially appreciated the diagrams that were presented in chapter 7 of the core of a research argument: We can make a claim (an assertion that demands support) because of a reason (an assertion that supports a claim) based on evidence (data deployed to support a reason). We add acknowledgements to anticipated questions and objections to our argument, and add warrants to strengthen the connection between claim and reason. I also found the section on the vocabulary of acknowledgement and response very helpful--often times I find myself looking up synonyms to qualifiers I repeatedly use in research writing, but this book gives me a remedy to that habit.
The quality of the claim made is important--it is either a conceptual or practical claim, although I tend to agree that a conceptual claim should be followed by a practical one to make your topic and argument more valuable. Claims should be specific enough so that your argument can be strong and focused, and reasonable qualifications should be made to make yourself more credible to your audience.
I am slightly offended that they used Watson and Crick as an example for good writing and along with it good research--Rosalind Franklin made the discovery of the structure of DNA; Watson's method of getting evidence were based on unethical standards, and I don't like how they used this example in a book that is supposed to promote good research.