In the article “The historical development of reasoning in scientific and methodological literature”, the stages of the study of reasoning as a type of speech in linguistic and didactic literature are investigated, the opinions of scientists about argumentative essays are described. The argumentative essay is based on logic and expository ability of students to express their thoughts. Reasoning is a functional-semantic type of speech, corresponding to the form of abstract thinking - inference, performing a special communicative task - to give speech a reasoned character and formalized with the help of lexical and grammatical means of cause-effect semantics. The coherent speech is created from understanding and narrating of didactic texts, ability to give the complete answers. The more language will be developed and learned, the more full knowledge will be gained, because it is a source of intellectual and speech development.