I've been guilty of this too. The funny thing is, if you actually want to win an argument that's exactly what you shouldn't do. If you respond to everything the

I've been guilty of this too. The funny thing is, if you actually want to win an argument that's exactly what you shouldn't do. If you respond to everything the other person said, and refute each of this points, then inevitably somebody will come along and take one of your refutations of an unimportant issue and point out a factual error in your refutation. Even if you are 100% correct, somebody will come along and misinterpret one of your sentences. At this point you've lost the debate, because now the entire debate is focused on that small point that you got wrong, and it can be difficult to steer it away from that onto the more important issues. No, if you want to win an argument you should do exactly the opposite. You should find one weakness in your opponent's argument, and then make a bulletproof refutation of that. You may think that because he made other points that are wrong it's better to point out all the ways in which he is wrong, but that's a bad strategy. Inevitably you will be wrong or misinterpretable in one of your many refutations and then you've lost. Both of these strategies are of course detrimental to having a productive debate ;-)