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,
