Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking

by Mehdi Hasan

He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.

Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it “to whom it may concern.”

This is how you make an argument in front of a skeptical audience. You have to be able to adapt, you have to be agile, and to do that, you have to know your audience and cater to it.

Remember: anytime an audience is present, you cannot, cannot, afford to ignore them or take them for granted. The audience is the key.

This means that to succeed in “knowing your audience,” you’ll have to do some legwork before you even enter the room, before you start speaking in front of a crowd.

How big is the audience? What kind of people constitute the audience? What’s the rough demographic? Are they young or old? Students or professionals? Political or apolitical? Male or female? White, Black, or Brown? It

you should present your argument in such a way that people feel comfortable getting on board with that argument, because you’ve specifically tailored it to their interests or identities.

cite facts, figures, and quotes that not only bolster your own argument but also appeal to the specific audience in front of you.

“Don’t take my word for it,” I said (always a useful phrase in front of a skeptical audience).

the average human loses “concentration after eight seconds.” You have very, very little time to capture an audience’s attention before they tune you out and start thinking about what they’re going to have for dinner

“Thank you for inviting me.” “I’m so glad to be here with you today.” “How are you all doing?” No. No. No. You must grab your audience in the very first minute, ideally in the very first ten or twenty seconds.

“Starting with a question creates a knowledge gap: a gap between what the listeners know and what they don’t know,”

“This gap creates curiosity because people are hardwired with a desire to fill knowledge gaps.”

Pay close attention to your first sentence if you want anyone else to pay attention to what you have to say. Surprise your audience with a striking one-liner, an irresistible question, or a visceral story.

What do you tend to do when you want to charm a person or win them over? You heap praise on them. You’re nice toward them. You make them feel special.

I cannot tell you the number of U.S. cities where I have been invited to speak or debate, and where I opened my remarks by suggesting that this particular city was my favorite city in America.

By sharing a revealing story or a personal flaw, you allow audience members a way to identify with you. You show how you are no different to them.

“An audience is never wrong,” he remarked. “An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark—that is critical genius.”

When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion. —Dale Carnegie, author

“facts don’t care about your feelings.” The point is that the truth is the truth, and whether you want to believe it or not, the facts don’t lie.

To move people to your side, you need to make them care. You’ll need your facts, your figures, your argument to be rock solid. But you’ll also need an approach that goes back millennia: you have to appeal to people’s hearts, not just their heads.

He called these his three proofs or “modes” of persuasion: ethos, pathos, and logos.

An appeal to ethos relies on the “character” and “credibility” of the speaker. The word ethics, as online speech coach Gini Beqiri has noted, is derived from ethos.

An appeal to pathos relies on our human emotions and feelings: fear, anger, joy, and the rest. The words empathy and sympathy, notes Beqiri, derive from pathos.

An appeal to logos is founded on logic and reason, on facts and figures. In fact, the word logic itself comes from logos, the Greek word meaning “reason.”

He tended to give equal treatment to all three of his modes of persuasion. But the reality is that pathos beats logos almost every time.

Pathos not only beats logos when it comes to influencing your audience, but pathos is also perhaps the best way to deliver logos to your audience.

We focus on facts, stats, and data, when, really, we should be channeling Captain Kirk and making an emotional appeal to our audience. Why pretend we’re Vulcans when we’re not? We’re humans who rely on our gut reactions; on our emotions, our feelings, our instincts.

Our feelings affect our decision-making in multiple ways.

“Humans are not either thinking machines or feeling machines,” says Damasio, “but rather feeling machines that think.”

“reason may not be as pure as most of us think.” Our emotions and feelings may not be “intruders in the bastion of reason” but rather “indispensable for rationality.” They are critical to guiding and influencing our decisions.

“Those who tell stories rule society” is a quote attributed to Plato, Aristotle’s teacher.

a good story “lights up” the emotional regions of our brain in line with the storyteller; if the speaker talks about the fear or inspiration they felt in a moment of struggle, we “mirror” it. We feel it, too.

A story, he adds, “is for a human as water is for fish.” Stanford University professor of marketing Jennifer Aaker even quantified our fondness for narrative, finding that “story is up to 22 times more memorable than facts alone.”

You could say: Ukraine was invaded by Russia. Or you could say: Defenseless and innocent Ukrainians are being bombed and attacked by Russian aggressors.

Conventional wisdom says you should always remain cool, calm, and collected. And, as I’ll explain in a later chapter, that’s generally great advice. There is no value in getting flustered during an argument, or in losing control of your emotions. But that doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions altogether. You need to come across as authentic and human—and that means “showing” your emotions and not concealing them.

The lingering question, however, is when to channel that anger, and how to balance it. In an outright shouting match, no one wins. So you need to pick your moment, and be ready to back up your sentiment with substance.

the introduction and the conclusion of a speech are the two most important and memorable junctures to make that emotional appeal to your audience. Start with emotion and end with emotion.

“The political brain,” he writes, “is an emotional brain.” His studies reveal, again and again, how voters are much more likely to vote for the candidate they like, rather than the candidate they agree with.

Republicans often win because “they have a near-monopoly in the marketplace of emotions,” while Democrats continue to naively “place their stock in the marketplace of ideas.”

For an increasing number of people, it seems that facts don’t matter. Evidence is ignored. Receipts have no value.

You need to have a solid factual base for what you’re arguing—or you’re going to get trounced by someone who can connect emotions and evidence. To win the argument, you’ll need both: feelings and facts.

When you let receipts talk, you build a chorus of sources on your side, all weighing in against your opponent. And if your opponent isn’t careful, their own words turn against them, too.

The Latin phrase ad hominem literally means “to the person”—and so the ad hominem argument is an argument that’s applied to, or against, the person.

pretty much every introductory textbook on philosophy, logic, or rhetoric sequesters ad hominem arguments to the chapter on logical fallacies. That is, they are literal mistakes in reasoning.

“If ad hominem arguments are illegitimate, how come they’re so useful?”

yes, in theory, you should attack the merits of the argument itself and not the person making it. But, in the real world, playing the ball and the man can prove to be a rather effective, and often necessary, tactic. It can discredit your opponent and their argument at the same time.

the fact is that ad hominem arguments are very often the best and most logical responses to another person’s claims.

most arguers place their own character, expertise, or credibility at issue when they make a claim. If somebody supports an argument with a pro hominem argument (which we normally call an “appeal to authority”) then the ad hominem argument becomes both a necessary and a proper response.

“allegations of conflict of interest may be just as influential as allegations of outright fraud”