Borrow the competitive debater's note-taking method: write each of the other side's points in a column as they are made, put the responses beside them, and look at what is left unanswered, so that volume and speed cannot substitute for substance.

How to do it

1. 1Divide a page into columns, one for each speaker or each turn. In the first column, write each distinct claim in a few words and number it.
2. 2Separate the claim from its support. Note next to each whether it came with evidence, a reason, or nothing: a bare assertion gets a mark saying so.
3. 3When the other side replies, write each response beside the point it addresses and draw an arrow. Points with nothing beside them were dropped; responses that sit beside nothing were never relevant.
4. 4Group points that are the same claim in different words. Ten restatements are one argument.
5. 5Before you respond, read across the page. Decide which points matter to the conclusion, answer those, say explicitly which ones you are setting aside as immaterial, and note which of your own points were never answered.
6. 6For a written thread or a recorded interview, do the same after the fact. It is slower, but the asymmetries show up just as clearly.

When to use it

• •A speaker delivers many points quickly and you feel unable to answer them all.
• •A meeting, negotiation, or hearing covers many issues, and you need to know afterwards what was actually agreed, answered, or evaded.
• •You are watching a debate or interview and want to judge it on what was said rather than who sounded confident.
• •Someone claims that you "never responded" to their point, or that they already answered yours.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

Flowing is the standard note-taking method of competitive policy and parliamentary debate and is taught in essentially every debate manual (for example Snider & Schnurer 2002). It is craft knowledge: there are no experiments on flowing as such. The reason it helps is well supported. Working memory holds only about four items at once (Cowan 2001), so a listener facing fifteen rapid points cannot track which were supported and which were answered, and falls back on overall impressions such as fluency and confidence. Writing the structure down moves that burden onto the page, the same cognitive offloading that makes checklists and argument maps useful. There is also evidence from persuasion research that sheer number of arguments acts as a peripheral cue when listeners are not scrutinizing content (Petty & Cacioppo 1984), which is the effect a flow neutralizes by collapsing restatements and marking unsupported claims. Evidence strength: practitioner craft with a well-supported cognitive rationale; no direct trials.

1. Snider, A. C., & Schnurer, M. (2002). Many Sides: Debate Across the Curriculum. International Debate Education Association
   A standard debate-education text describing flowing as the method for tracking arguments and responses across speeches.
2. Cowan, N. (2001). The magical number 4 in short-term memory: A reconsideration of mental storage capacity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(1), 87-114
   The estimate that working memory holds roughly four chunks, which is why unaided listeners cannot track many rapid points.
3. Petty, R. E., & Cacioppo, J. T. (1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1), 69-81
   Evidence that the number of arguments persuades by itself when listeners are not scrutinizing their quality.