.

4. Arguments and the Audience. In argument, therefore, far more than in
other kinds of writing, one must keep the audience definitely in mind.
"Persuade" and "convince" for our purposes are active verbs, and in most
cases their objects have an important effect on their significance. An
argument on a given subject that will have a cogent force with one set
of people, will not touch, and may even repel, another. To take a simple
example: an argument in defense of the present game of football would
change considerably in proportions and in tone according as it was
addressed to undergraduates, to a faculty, or to a ministers'
conference. Huxley's argument on evolution (p. 233), which was delivered
to a popular audience, has more illustrations and is less compressed in
reasoning than if it had been delivered to the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences. Not only theoretically, but in practice, arguments must
vary in both form and substance with the audiences to which they are
addressed. An argument shot into the void is not likely to bring down
much game.

5. Profitable Subjects for Arguments. To get the best results from
practice in writing arguments, you must choose your subjects with care
and sagacity. Some classes of subjects are of small value. Questions
which rest on differences of taste or temperament from their very nature
can never be brought to a decision. The question whether one game is
better than another--football better than baseball, for example--is not
arguable, for in the end one side settles down to saying, "But I like
baseball best," and you stick there. Closely akin is such a question as,
Was Alexander Pope a poet; for in the word "poet" one includes many
purely emotional factors which touch one person and not another. Matthew
Arnold made a brave attempt to prove that Wordsworth stood third in
excellence in the long line of English poets, and his essay is a notable
piece of argument; but the very statement of his thesis, that Wordsworth
"left a body of poetical work superior in power, in interest, in the
qualities which give enduring freshness, to that which any of the others
has left," shows the vanity of the attempt. To take a single
word--"interest"--from his proposition: what is the use of arguing with
me, if Wordsworth happened to bore me, as he does not, that I ought to
find him interesting. All I could do would be humbly to admit my
deficiency, and go as cheerfully as might be to Burns or Cole