How to Win Arguments

Another important facet of private arguments is that the participants will take the outcome intensely personally and will frequently carry it over into other parts of their private life. You must have noticed how an argument with friends or colleagues can have repercussions quite out of proportion to the importance of the original disagreement. People have been known to refuse to speak to each other for days, months or even years because of some minor squabble that got out of control.

One of the troubles with private arguments is that they often serve as an outlet for underlying hostilities. In fact such an argument will frequently be engineered solely for the purpose of providing an outlet for past grudges. Even where the original argument is genuine, it is surprising how, when emotions become aroused, the placid surface of everyday behaviour gets completely disrupted. Once this has happened there are no limits to what can result. Look, for example, at what happened in the former Yugoslavia when some of the constituent peoples informed their Serb neighbours that they would like to go their own way and form independent states. This may at first appear to be a matter of politics but, when you listen to the stories of those involved, it becomes apparent that many of the grievances and hostilities had their origins in squabbles between neighbours that got completely out of hand. News reports all emphasized that people suffered atrocities that were committed not by a foreign army but, in many cases, by people they knew by name.

Public Arguments

On the other hand, in a public argument the participants are usually much more interested in the effect their words will have on the audience than in whether they can convince an opponent. Indeed, most of the people who argue in public (businessmen, lawyers, politicians, journalists) come into the category of professional arguers. Their whole career is conducted in an atmosphere of verbal strife and they attack or defend a point of view on a purely professional basis. It is not being cynical to suggest that frequently they do not personally believe in the point of view they are expressing with such eloquence at all. For the most part, ‘ordinary’ people do not come into contact with the world of professional public arguments. But it can happen. If it does you must be able to decide whether you should respond to your opponent as a person or merely as the mouthpiece of a particular point of view.

A public argument is necessarily more formal than a private one. Often it will be conducted according to specific rules and may even have some sort of umpire or chairperson to make sure the rules are kept. Even though tempers may flare they will rarely be allowed to get so out of hand that physical violence erupts. Additionally there is a penalty attached to letting oneself get carried away. The audience will take it as a sign of the weakness of one’s case. There will also be some sort of timetable in operation and therefore unless you use your time skilfully you might inadvertently gloss over or forget important points. Once the argument is over, no matter how many witty retorts come to you on the way home, you will probably not get another chance. Most public arguments are one-off events where the quality of your performance on the day is just as important as whether you have right on your side.

Another feature of public arguments is that, in common with written arguments, they are almost always ‘on the record’, and usually there will be some kind of permanent record made in the form of notes, recorded on a paper and/or electronic document, or on audio or video tape or film. The tendency will therefore be for people to weigh their words carefully and avoid the sort of overly personal and dramatic statements that flourish in a purely private setting.

It is also likely that a lot more will be riding on the result of a public argument. Court cases, political debates (at both national and local level), public inquiries, and formal meetings of boards of governors are all the sorts of occasions where public arguments take place and where the results may well have far-reaching, long-term consequences. Even a debate on television, though it may appear to be little more than a piece of entertainment, will have an effect in moulding public opinion. Therefore a public argument is in all respects a much more serious affair than a private one.

Written Arguments

Almost all arguments can be carried on in writing but generally we reserve this method for our more formal disagreements. The reasons are obvious: anything you put in writing and send to someone enters the public domain and cannot be recalled. This has a number of implications, not least of which is that you can be held legally responsible for your words. Call a man a lying bastard to his face and you risk a split lip; write it down and you risk heavy damages for libel. However, in spite of the risks involved this method has considerable advantages that make it widely popular. The very fact that you and your opponent must measure your words and imagine them being read by a wider audience will inevitably raise the quality of debate. You will think twice about quoting evidence that can be retained and checked by an unknown number of third parties. You will also, if you are prudent, remember that your words, if spoken hastily and unwisely, may return to haunt you. Anyone who remembers President Bush urging people to ‘read my lips’ while he promised no new taxes will also remember his immense discomfiture when he later broke that promise.

Written arguments have the other advantage of allowing you time for reflection and research before you reply to your opponent’s latest onslaught. An argument conducted in writing will favour the conscientious researcher who pays attention to getting the details right but will penalize the person who relies on a ready wit to skate over the cracks in his reasoning.

Yet another reason for people favouring written arguments is that by putting your opponent at arm’s length you remove his power to use some of the more aggressive techniques of argument. The written word forms a screen between you and the opponent that protects you from people who try to get their own way purely by force of personality. In fact, you may observe something interesting that often happens once people commit their arguments to writing. It is quite common to find rather ineffectual people who would not normally say boo to a goose transformed into lions once they are able to express themselves in writing. This can be a good thing if it enables people to get the fair hearing of which they would otherwise have been deprived. On the other hand there is the less pleasant phenomenon of the ‘poisoned pen’ in which people who seem quite affable suddenly reveal a talent for vituperation as soon as they are let loose with a pen and a sheet of paper.

The issue of emotion in written arguments is also interesting. People are on the whole less inclined to let themselves go when putting their thoughts down on paper. Many people resort to the old trick of writing two responses to their opponent. The first is the one where they really lash out and call him all the names they can think of. Then, having got that off their chest, they tear the first letter up and set about writing the calm, dignified response they are actually going to send. If you do not do this already it is a tactic well worth adopting.

In a written argument you have a chance, largely denied to you in face-to-face situations, to adopt a persona that may be quite at variance with your real character. Whereas in real life you might get easily flustered, stammer, go red in the face and forget the important details of your case (and we all do some of these things from time to time), once you enter the realm of written argument you can be as calm, suave and poised as you please – you have time to get it right. You may also choose to show the draft of your letter to a trusted friend or a paid advisor (such as your lawyer or accountant) and get the benefit of that advice before you send the final version. The great luxury of written arguments is that you can draft and redraft each document as many times as you wish until you get it exactly the way you want it.

Although written arguments have great advantages they also have dangers that you should bear in mind before embarking upon one. You should make quite sure that you are operating in a field where you know all the rules. You should not, for example, unless you have legal training, try to conduct a legal argument in writing. You may think that what you have said is straightforward and unambiguous but, in a legal context, words can take on meanings that they do not have in everyday speech. Also you will discover that lawyers are very practised at picking to pieces any argument presented to them. The only person likely to be able to stop them doing that is another lawyer. The rule here is to recognize your limitations and never let the joy of battle tempt you into playing out of your league.

If you are going to argue in writing you must be very strict with yourself and make sure you do not indulge in irrelevance and high-sounding waffle. Things you might just get away with when you speak can look awfully stupid when written down. Try to cut out words you do not need. Keep your sentences and paragraphs short and to the point. Make sure that your argument flows naturally and logically from your initial outline of the facts, through your proof, to what you hope is an inescapable conclusion.

Family Arguments

Kevin, a designer who used to do work for me, was in business with his younger brother. Things went pretty well for them for some years. They had a studio on the ground floor of their elderly mother’s house and the whole family got on very well. Then the brother, Robert, got married to a French woman called Thérèse. Suddenly all hell was let loose. The new wife did not get on with the elder brother. The mother was drawn into the quarrel. The brothers stopped speaking. The rows became so frequent and so furious that the studio had to be partitioned to keep the warring factions apart. Finally they even had to have separate entrances to the house constructed. At the height of the mayhem a meeting was called with all the family members and their accountants and solicitors present. Things quickly got out of hand. Kevin, a rather easygoing soul most of the time, started to say something about trying to settle the whole mess reasonably when Thérèse bellowed at the top of her voice: ‘What’s reason got to do with it? A family is not a democracy!’ It is a quotation worth remembering. It will remind you that family arguments are in a league of insanity all of their own.

An argument within the family is rarely concerned with the apparent subject matter. Most arguments start over something so banal as to be hardly worth considering, like whose turn it is to wash up, or whether someone remembered to lock the front door last night. If such an argument were to start outside the family it would probably be resolved quickly and possibly even amicably. However, families are different. When a little group of people lives together year in year out, often in a fairly confined space, frustrations are bound to build up. And because we are supposed to love our parents, partners and children no matter how badly they behave towards us, we often feel we have to suppress our resentment. No wonder explosions occur so often. When you see a family argument in full swing, that old statistic about people being most likely to get murdered by a member of their own family makes perfect sense. As the zoologist Desmond Morris observed, the interesting thing about people is not that they are so prone to violence but that for most of the time they manage to avoid it so well. It is worth mentioning that these remarks apply not just to traditional families but to other sorts of households, such as groups of students.

Furthermore, the very closeness of family relationships makes for high levels of emotion. Because our family members do love us we feel that we can exhibit to them a side of our personality that we have to keep hidden from the world at large. Sulky teenagers become even more morose with their parents, while frustrated husbands pick on their harassed wives and vice versa.

Family arguments are also in a class of their own in that they have almost nothing to do with reason, concern for the truth or even, in many cases, true self-interest. All these things are quite alien to the way people in families behave. Their main concern will be with methods of manipulation (see page 94). They will use every trick in the book to cajole, blackmail or bamboozle their loved ones into behaving in the way they want. This process of manipulation will be the main purpose of the argument. The ostensible object will on most occasions be peripheral to the real aims of the arguers. In other words it doesn’t matter in the slightest that you washed the car; what matters is that I made you wash it.

Manipulation has a bad name because it involves emotional dishonesty. People believe that it is not possible to have a good relationship with someone if you are not honest with them. However, families have their own internal structure and the practice of manipulation helps to maintain that structure. Many couples maintain a sort of emotional Punch and Judy relationship in which verbal assaults, followed by reconciliations, help to ensure that aggression is channelled safely and real violence never occurs.

There is little that we can do about this. Arguments of this sort, in moderation, help us to blow off steam and release the pressures under which we live. That is all to the good. The occasions when people lose control and a domestic argument turns into a blood bath, though they make sensational headlines, are mercifully few.

At the moment we are concerned with only one question: how do you win a family argument? Obviously different criteria apply from just about any other sort of argument. Within the family, just because you manage to make your spouse or child admit that it really was his or her turn to mow the lawn that does not mean you have in any meaningful sense won the argument. In fact, beating someone into submission (figuratively or literally) never counts as a win in such circumstances. Winning is only achieved by an outcome that will help the family to continue functioning effectively. A bloody good row in which all parties give vent to their suppressed anger can be a win for everybody involved if it is followed by a genuine reconciliation. ‘Say what you like but never go to bed mad,’ is the best advice anyone can follow in a family row.

Arguments and the Gender Gap

When considering the types of arguments in which people indulge I thought it might be interesting to consider whether women argue differently from men. Perhaps my whole perspective on argument was exclusively male and was therefore blinding me to a side of the subject that women would find obvious. I started by asking friends and colleagues what they thought. Almost without exception they claimed that women would argue differently with members of their own sex than with men. They accepted that in mixed company women might well be pressured into emulating a male style of argument but, among themselves, they would be far more reasonable. A lot of well-worn prejudices started to appear. Men felt that women were more inclined to argue from a purely emotional point of view while they, of course, were practical, hard-headed chaps who seldom let emotion rule their reason. Strangely, women felt something similar about themselves. However, they preferred to put it a different way and used words like ‘feeling’, ‘intuition’, and ‘consensus’. They, you will be unsurprised to hear, were not impressed by the men’s claims to be more reasonable. They felt that they were themselves perfectly reasonable but possessed some ill-defined extra quality that men could never quite grasp.