The Craft of Research: Chapter 7 "Making Good Arguements"

Every argument, research or not, is built out of the answers to  five questions in that conversation, questions that you must ask yourself on your readers’ behalf:

1. What is my claim?

2. What reasons support my claim?

3. What evidence supports my reasons?

4. Do I acknowledge alternatives / complications / objections, and how do I respond?

5. What principle makes my reasons relevant to my claim? (We call this principle a warrant.)

(Booth 109).

A claim is a sentence that asserts something that may be true or false and so needs support: The world is warming up.

The main claim of a report is the sentence (or more) that the whole report supports (some call this sentence your thesis). If you wrote a report to prove that the world is warming up, the sentence stating that would be your main claim.

A reason is a sentence supporting a claim, main or not.

The first kind of support, a reason, is a statement that gives your readers cause to accept your claim. We often join a reason to a claim with because: (Booth 110). 

The emancipation of Russian peasants was an empty gesture claim because it did not improve the material quality of their daily lives. reason
TV violence can have harmful psychological effects on children claim because their constant exposure to violent images makes them think that violence is natural.reason

You usually need more than one reason to support a contestable claim, and in a detailed argument, each reason will usually be a separate sentence. (Booth 111).

The second kind of support is the evidence on which you base your reasons. Now the distinction between reasons and evidence can seem just a matter of semantics, and in some contexts the words do seem interchangeable:You have to base your claim on good reasons.
You have to base your claim on good evidence.But they are not synonyms, and distinguishing them is crucial in making sound arguments. Compare these two sentences:

What evidence do you base your reason on?
What reason do you base your evidence on?

That second sentence seems odd: we don’t base evidence on reasons; we base reasons on evidence.

There are other differences:
• We think up reasons by the action of our mind.
• We have to search for evidence “out there” in the “hard” reality of the world, then make it available for everyone to see. (Booth 111). 

With reasons and evidence, we have the core of a research argument: To offer a complete argument, however, you must add at least one more element and often a second: you must acknowledge other points of view and offer what we call warrants, which show how a reason is relevant to a claim. (Booth 112).

Careful readers will question  every part of your argument, so
you must anticipate as many of their questions as you can, and
then acknowledge and respond to the most important ones.

(Page 113).

If you think readers might ask that question, you would
be wise to acknowledge and respond to it:

(Page 113).