Before engaging with objections, questions, or someone else's summary of your view, say in one or two plain sentences what you actually hold and what you do not, so that the discussion is about your position and not a version built for you.

How to do it

1. 1Prepare a statement of your position that is short enough to say in one breath and specific enough to be wrong. Include its limits: what you are not claiming.
2. 2Open with it, or interrupt a mischaracterization with it: "Before I answer, let me say what my position is, because it is not quite that."
3. 3Decline the premise of a loaded question before answering anything else. Answering "why do you want to abolish X?" with reasons accepts that you want to abolish X.
4. 4Put it in writing where you can (a first slide, a top paragraph, a pinned post, the minutes), so there is a fixed text to point back to when the summary drifts.
5. 5When your view is restated by the other side, check the restatement against your sentence and correct it immediately and briefly. Corrections made twenty minutes later look like backpedalling.
6. 6Extend the same courtesy. Ask the other person to state their position in their own words, and argue against that.

When to use it

• •An interviewer, opponent, or colleague introduces your view for you, or asks a question that presupposes it.
• •A discussion of a charged topic is starting, and positions are likely to be assigned by team.
• •You are presenting a nuanced position that sits near a more extreme one people already have in mind.
• •A written exchange is likely to be quoted or summarized elsewhere.

Counters

Evidence and how strong it is

The practice follows from how argumentation theory treats dialogue. In Walton and Krabbe's (1995) account, each participant has a set of commitments, and a fair exchange depends on those commitments being correctly recorded; the straw-man fallacy is precisely the attribution of a commitment the person does not hold (Walton 2008). Stating your commitments first makes misattribution easier to see and to correct. Framing research gives a second reason: the way an issue is first described shapes later evaluation (Entman 1993; Tversky & Kahneman 1981), so the party who sets the description has an advantage that is harder to reverse than to pre-empt. Work on the continued-influence effect likewise shows that corrections only partly undo an established impression (Lewandowsky et al. 2012), which favors getting the accurate version on the record early. None of this tests the technique itself in live disagreement. Evidence strength: consensus in argumentation theory and indirect support from framing and correction research; no direct trials.

1. Walton, D. N., & Krabbe, E. C. W. (1995). Commitment in Dialogue: Basic Concepts of Interpersonal Reasoning. State University of New York Press
   The model of dialogue in which each party's commitments must be accurately tracked for argument to proceed fairly.
2. Walton, D. (2008). Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press
   The analysis of the straw-man fallacy as misattribution of a position and of loaded questions as presupposing unaccepted commitments.
3. Entman, R. M. (1993). Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of Communication, 43(4), 51-58
   The account of framing as selecting and making salient some aspects of an issue, which advantages whoever describes it first.
4. Lewandowsky, S., Ecker, U. K. H., Seifert, C. M., Schwarz, N., & Cook, J. (2012). Misinformation and its correction: Continued influence and successful debiasing. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 13(3), 106-131
   Review showing that corrections only partly undo an established impression, which favors getting the accurate version on record early.