How to argue well

Three different jobs hide inside the word arguing, and most arguments are lost by somebody who never chose between them.

This page is method. Nothing in it says what is true on any particular question, because that is what the claim entries are for, and it cannot win you a conversation with somebody who came to have a fight. You can decline any argument you like.

Decide what you are doing before you speak

Three, and they want three different methods.

Persuading the person in front of you. Rare, slow, and almost always private. It runs on questions rather than answers, and it usually finishes days later, somewhere else. Nobody reverses a position in front of an audience.

Persuading the people listening. Short, calm, one point, and you can leave whenever you like. The person you are answering is the occasion, not the target.

Refusing to let something stand. Not persuading anybody, but declining to let a sentence pass in silence so that everybody present knows it was contested. One sentence, no follow-up.

“I’m not going to argue about that tonight. I’m also not letting it go past. It isn’t true, and I wanted that said.”

That is a completed job, not a failed argument. Say it, then talk about something else.

Deciding too fast that somebody is committed is how the second job backfires. One tell: a person who asks you a question back is still in the conversation. A person who only restates, louder, is not.

You are not going to change their mind

The committed person has taken a position in public. Conceding costs them standing with people whose opinion they care about, and nothing you say in ten minutes is worth that.

So stop aiming there. The people saying nothing have committed to nothing, they outnumber the person talking, and they watch how you both behave at least as closely as they follow what you say.

Ask what they mean before you answer

Most disagreements here are two people using one word for different things. Answer the sentence you heard and you may spend twenty minutes fighting about something neither of you believes.

“Before I answer, what do you mean by that word? I’ve heard it used about four different ways.”

“Who are you including when you say Zionists?”

Ask once, then answer something. A second question in a row reads as cross-examination, and the room stops being on your side.

Concede when it sharpens your point, not as a matter of course

Handbooks teach this as a universal and it is not one. Concede when the concession sharpens what you say next. Leave it alone when it only adds a footnote. A caveat that buys you nothing is a weaker sentence, not integrity.

What it buys depends entirely on who is listening.

A briefed opponent knows the fact already and is waiting to catch you denying it. Here the concession is worth most, and worth most said first.

An audience that has never followed this cannot see your caveat and can hear your hedge, and takes away that you sounded unsure of your own case. Say the hardest sentence that is completely true, plainly.

A committed activist takes the concession, returns nothing, and quotes the first half of it somewhere you are not. Grant what you would be caught denying anyway. Nothing else.

“One part of that is true, and it matters. The rest doesn’t follow from it, and that’s the bit I’d argue with.”

Never say the first half without the second. A concession left sitting there is a retreat; one that becomes the blade in the next sentence is why you made it. And concede only what you would still say with nobody watching, because a point granted under pressure comes back as a quotation with your name on it.

Four concessions cover almost every argument on this site, each with the sentence that turns it: the four concessions.

Know their best case better than they do

Not the version you find easy to knock down. The version their most intelligent ally would make.

That is why every claim entry here states the case against you first, in full, before answering a word of it, and it is the part to learn: the person who can state the opposing case fairly is visibly the one not frightened of it. Carry it lightly, though. Announcing that you can make their argument better than they can wins the point and loses the person.

One point, held

Three points inside two minutes leaves nothing behind. Say one thing, defend it, and land it again at the end. People remember one sentence from an exchange, and it is almost never the third one you made.

Somebody who delivers six claims in ninety seconds has not made an argument either. They have made a list, faster than any one item can be answered. Pick the load-bearing one, meaning the claim that takes the rest of the case down with it. And answer side questions briefly rather than refusing them, or holding one point reads as evasion.

“There are five things in that. I’m not doing all five. The third one is the one that matters, so let me take that.”

“That’s a fair question, and here’s the short answer. But the thing I’d want you to take away is still this.”

When you do not know

Say so. “I don’t know, I’ll find out” costs almost nothing and is heard as confidence rather than weakness.

“I don’t know. I’ll look it up and tell you what I find, including if it turns out you were right.”

Then go and do it. That is what buys the standing. Guessing is the expensive option: one invented figure, caught, poisons everything true you said before it.

Heat

Matching their volume loses the audience even when you are right. Everybody stops weighing the content and starts watching a row, and afterwards that is all they remember.

Go the other way. Drop your volume, slow down, leave two seconds before you answer. It is unfair, because it asks the person with most at stake to be the calmest there, and it is still what works.

When to stop, and when one sentence is the whole job

Walking away is not losing. There is no scoreboard, and nobody watching is keeping one.

You are past the useful point once you have made the same point three times. Also once the people listening have gone back to their phones. Also once you want to win more than you want to be understood.

“We’re not going to agree on this, and I’d rather not spend the evening on it. Let’s leave it there.”

Some rooms have decided before you arrive, or give you thirty seconds while the other side holds the microphone. There the third job is the only one on offer: put one true sentence on the record, calmly, and stop. That is a success, and treating it as a defeat is how people conclude they are bad at this and never try again.

Warn people before the line arrives

The most underused move available to you.

Two halves. You forewarn people that an attempt is coming, and you give them a weakened version of the line with the answer already attached. A warning with no content produces vague suspicion. Content with no warning is a rebuttal arriving too late.

Warn about the manoeuvre rather than the topic. A warning about one claim protects against that claim; a warning about the move itself, the loaded question or the shifting standard, covers lines nobody has written yet. Said to a group before a meeting:

“Within ten minutes somebody will ask whether you condemn something, before you’re allowed to say anything else. However you answer, it makes everything after it sound conditional. You can answer honestly and say out loud that you’re not accepting the condition.”

A review pooling 42 studies and 42,530 people found it lowers the credibility given to misinformation and improves people’s ability to tell true from false. Real effects, and modest ones.

The timing is the whole thing. Before the line is heard it is a warning. After, it sounds like being told what to think, so if you missed the moment, warn about the next one instead.

Where technique becomes trickery

If a move would work equally well in the mouth of somebody who is wrong, it is a trick. Run everything above against it.

Most of the page survives, because each move carries something true: what you concede is true, the ambiguity you ask about is real, the load-bearing claim is load-bearing. Repetition is the one that fails. A line repeated is rated more true whether or not it is true, so it serves somebody who is wrong exactly as well, and it belongs only on something you have already checked.

Being caught running a trick turns an argument about the subject into an argument about you, and everything you ever said is reread in that light, including the parts that were true and sourced.

Before the next one, not during it

Fill in the blanks155 words

Three questions, from memory. Which of the three jobs are you usually doing, and which are you pretending to do? What is the test that tells you a move has become a trick? And what are the three signals that you are past the useful point?

This week. Open one claim entry, read the case against you before the answer, then write the concession in one sentence and underneath it the sentence that turns it. If the second will not come, the concession was never worth making.

Your plan. If somebody makes a claim I have not thought about before, then I will ask what they mean by it and say nothing else until they have answered.

Your coping plan. If I hear my own voice getting louder, or I notice I have made the same point three times, then I will say we are not going to agree tonight, and stop talking about it.