Navya-Nyāya logicians developed a technical concept called vyāpti — the invariable concomitance that makes inference valid. You cannot conclude 'there is fire on the hill' from smoke unless you have established, through repeated encounter, that smoke and fire always travel together. Without vyāpti, your inference is just a guess dressed up as a conclusion. What almost no one notices is that the same structure governs good expository writing. A well-constructed argument doesn't just assert a relationship between two ideas — it shows the reader why that relationship is invariable: every time X obtains, Y follows, and the failure case would look like this. Most writing that feels 'thin' isn't failing at prose; it's failing at vyāpti. The claim is there. The example is there. What's missing is the demonstration that the connection holds universally enough to bear the weight being placed on it. Gangeśa, the 13th-century Mithilā philosopher who formalized Navya-Nyāya in the Tattvacintāmaṇi, spent extraordinary effort distinguishing genuine vyāpti from accidental co-occurrence — the kind of correlation that looks like entailment but breaks under a single counterexample. That's exactly the pressure a skeptical reader applies to your argument. The discipline this suggests is concrete: after drafting a key claim, ask what the failure condition would be — what scenario would make the connection not hold. If you can't name it, you haven't yet earned the inference. If you can name it and your argument survives it, you have something worth publishing.

In a piece of writing you're currently working on, what is the one inferential move — the 'therefore' — that you haven't yet stress-tested against a case where it might not hold?

Drawing from Navya-Nyāya (New Logic school of Indian philosophy) — Gangeśa Upādhyāya (13th century CE, Tattvacintāmaṇi — foundational text of Navya-Nyāya, systematizing the theory of vyāpti as the basis of valid inference)