David Mills: Six rules for writing about politics in the hope of changing someone's mind

I have more than once in my writing been accused of the opposite errors in the same article. A few columns ago, some readers called me a fascist and the like and a couple other readers called me a leftist, for them as bad a word as fascist, and all of them seemed very angry.

They were both wrong, I think because a certain kind of mind assumes that if you don't agree with their hatred of the other side, you must be on the other side. I thought I was writing as an old-fashioned liberal and humanist, the attitude in which I was raised, but that's not good enough for the ideologue.

That kind of thing has gotten worse and worse for everyone as the political campaign has gone on, and it's only going to keep getting worse whoever wins. In the hope of helping people talk to each other fruitfully, here are six rules for writing about politics, derived from years of experience with writers and would-be writers.

Trying to convince

For my purposes here, I assume you're writing to try to convince someone who disagrees with you, or at least to make them reconsider their position, and that you're writing for a public readership, whether on social media or in a newspaper opinion section, and (at least in theory) trying to speak to readers of every political belief. I assume you want the interest of someone who disagrees with you more than the cheers of people who already agree with you.

In other words, you're not the guy sitting at the end of the bar giving the world his opinion, but one of the people at a table having a conversation with others you care enough to want to change their minds. You're writing for a public purpose, not just to hear yourself talk, or (as too often) rage or rant.

One more thing. I describe an ideal. I don't claim to always meet it.

First, don't write when you feel you must say something. You probably don't and whatever you feel you must say has probably already been said in public 10,000 times, and at least 1000 of those said it better. Only write when you know (not feel) you have something to say and particular people you know you should say it to.

Try to answer honestly whether you'd want to read you if you weren't you. (For anyone, including several friends, about to send me a snarky note, columnists have the excuse of having been chosen for the job, and the somewhat pardonable vanity to believe they were well chosen. So shut up, Mark.)

Second, don't pretend to be nonpartisan or neutral or objective. Every human being sees the world a certain way. Try to suss out your commitments, beliefs, desires and hopes, assumptions, prejudices (in the two senses of bigotries and of rational prejudgments) and admit them as needed.

Among other benefits, knowing where you start should help you understand how you sound to others and know better where your blind spots are and what you have to explain to them. It should also make easier understanding why people don't surrender when you feel you're so obviously right.

Third, don't expect much success, if any. Just like you, people believe what they do for reasons that seem good to them, and the reasons are complicated and not completely conscious. Like you, they will only rarely, actually pretty much never, change their minds in response to a single good argument or new evidence.

However, you may be able to bump them off course a little bit and enough bumps over time may turn them around. Even a few bumps may shift what they see enough to make them want to turn farther on their own.

But you, you probably won't see any change.You do your best and hope you affected them a little. This does take off the pressure to change their minds.

Fourth, try very hard to be fair. This is hugely hard. Most of us want to win, perhaps to win more than we want to convince. I think the best way to be fair, or fairer than we're inclined to be, is to write as factually as you can about your subject, quoting them and pointing to things they've done, and drawing only the conclusions you can draw from the facts.

The more objective your claims, the better you can test them. You can ask yourself if you've quoted or reported accurately. For example, if you've selected the facts to make your case and left out others that hurt it.

Fifth, write as cooly as you can. Don't think, as too many people do, that your writing carries the force of the writing. It doesn't. Your evidence and arguments do, and they'll carry more force the more calmly you state them. Hot writing is the written equivalent of yelling and no one likes being yelled at, even by someone they agree with.

One easy way to chill your writing is to cut every adverb and adjective unless you can articulate why you need it. You rarely do. We all use them too easily to insult our targets or hype our points. Using them feels like stomping on the gas pedal to run the red light. It may feel great but it will eventually end badly.

Sixth, continually read people you disagree with. Read them with as much sympathy as you can manage, stretching your mind before writing the way you'd stretch your body before running. You want to problematize your own thinking, as the academics put it.

This means more than reading mainstream conservatives if you're a liberal and mainstream liberals if you're a conservative. It means reading widely outside that mainstream, whose apparent disagreements often hide a deep agreement and alway excludes genuine alternatives. For example, read the libertarian site Reason and the socialist site Jacobin. Both critique both mainstream alternatives in illuminating ways.

In summary

To summarize the rules: Write to others as you would have them write to you, and write about others as you would have them write about you. If we all did that better, the world of public speech would be kinder and quieter and more useful.