[naftaliharris]

> Elon might have been better off concentrating on this point more, rather than some of the smaller inaccuracies.

I agree. Often when you're arguing, you have a really strong argument and a few weaker ones. You'd think that making both the strong argument and the weaker ones would be the best case, (ie, that the strength of your case equals the sum of the strength of its components). In fact, in public discourse often the opposite is true. People will knock down your weaker arguments, making you and your case look bad. So I think the strength of your case might actually be closer to the minimum of the strength of its components.

For this reason, Elon would likely have been better off to emphasize and shore up his strongest argument--that Broder knowingly did not charge enough at Norwich--rather than try and nickle and dime Broder on a lot of smaller issues.

[scarmig]

Worse than that: imagine you have one absolutely damning issue and four weak ones. If the weak ones are swatted away one-by-one or muddled, the reader doesn't even remember the damning one that remains. It even comes off as "well, the person making the accusation prefered to spend time talking about the weak ones while he could have been talking about the ostensibly strong one, so how strong could it really have been?"

I would argue it's nearly always best, both rhetorically and analytically, to reconstruct your opponent's case as generously and sympathetically as possible, and then bear down very hard on your strong point.

[rayiner]

> In fact, in public discourse often the opposite is true.

This isn't just true in public discourse by the way. It's true in proposal/grant writing, legal argumentation, or even just arguing with your parents. You should always lead with your strongest arguments, and think very carefully before including any weak ones. Humans are just bad at doing weighted analysis of persuasive arguments. Say you have an argument, with three points, with weights: 0.9, 0.05, and 0.05. Your opponent destroying your two weak arguments is going to convince the reader or decision maker far more than the 0.1 combined weight of the arguments.

[lcc_tn]

What you say resonates very much with my experiences too.

Do you happen to have book recommendations maybe that talk about this at a greater length?

[rayiner]

Argument and rhetoric is a whole field of study. Prof. David Zarefsky at Northwestern has a good set of lectures on the subject which are on Amazon. The outline is here: http://thefulldialectician.synthasite.com/resources/ZAREFSKY...

My exposure to the subject has been in the legal context. This is a popular textbook on legal argumentation: Gardner, Legal Argument: The Structure and Language of Effective Advocacy. Someone has an older edition for cheap on EBay: http://www.ebay.com/itm/LEGAL-ARGUMENT-THE-STRUCTURE-AN-/310.... The text is quite general, not all that specific to the legal context.

[lcc_tn]

Thanks very much! I'll definitely look into these.