Other things being equal, however, brevity carries an audience.  If you can sum up your case in half the time that it takes the other side to state theirs, the chances are that your audience will think you have the right of it.  Above all, beware of boring your readers by too exhaustive explanation of details or of aspects of the case which they care nothing about.  I suppose there is no one of us who has not a worthy friend or two who will talk through a whole evening on whether a lawn should be watered in the evening or the early morning, or whether the eighth hole on the golf course should not be fifty yards longer.  One must not be like the man who in the discussion of bimetallism a few years ago used to keep his wife awake at night expounding to her the iniquities and inequalities of a single standard.  It is safer to underestimate than to overestimate the endurance and patience of your audience.

52.  The Refutation.  The place of the refutation will, as we have seen in the chapter on planning (see p. 82), vary greatly with the argument and with the audience.  Its purpose is to put out of the way as effectively as possible the main points urged by the other side.  In an argument of fact this is done both by exposing weak places in the reasoning and by throwing doubt on the facts cited, either through proof that they are contradicted by better evidence, or that the evidence brought forward to establish them is shaky or inconclusive.  In an argument of policy the points on the other side are met either by throwing doubt on the facts on which they rest, or by showing that the points themselves have not coercive force.

Where there are really strong points on the other side, in either kind of argument, it is often sound policy to admit their strength.  This is especially true in arguments of policy where the advantages are closely balanced.  If you are trying to convince a boy that he should go to your college rather than to another, you do not gain anything by telling him that the other college is no good; if he is worth gaining over he will know better than that.  And in general if you have given a man to understand that there is nothing to be said for the other side, and he afterwards finds that there are strong grounds for it, your argument will have a fall in his estimation.

In the manner of your refutation lean towards the side of soberness and courtesy.  It has been said that the poorest use you can put a man to is to refute him; and it is certain that in the give and take of argument in active life the personal victories and defeats are what are soonest forgotten.  If after a while you have to establish a fact in history or in biology, or to get a verdict from a jury or a favorable report from the committee of a legislature, you will think a good deal more about the arguments of your opponents than about them personally.  There are few arguments in which you can afford to take no notice of the strong points of the other side; and where the burden of proof is strongly with you, your own argument may be almost wholly refutation; but it is always worth bearing in mind that if it is worth while for you to be arguing at all, there is something, and something of serious weight, to be said on the other side.