I&#x27;ve never quite understood the point in &quot;moderating&quot; the arguments in a persuasive essay. If you are trying to convince someone who&#x27;s at -100 on a spectrum, of a view that&#x27;s all the way up at +100, then—even if you make the best points ever and completely &quot;win them over&quot; during the argument—you&#x27;ll maybe only sway their day-to-day view to being -50, or possibly as high as 0.<p>If you tell someone who thinks the sky is blue that it&#x27;s red, then they&#x27;ll end up believing it&#x27;s purple. If you try to convince them that it&#x27;s purple, though, then they&#x27;ll probably think it&#x27;s far closer to blue than you meant. If you <i>want</i> them to see the sky as purple, then you have to insist it&#x27;s red.<p>It&#x27;s sort of a Red Queen problem: people <i>know</i> others use hyperbole and absolutes to make rhetorical points. So, when listening to an argument, people internally temper every point they hear to &quot;remove&quot; the rhetorical effect. Thus, when trying to make a point, you <i>need</i> the hyperbole and absolutes—because even without them, people will still assume they&#x27;re there <i>anyway</i>, and &quot;temper&quot; your point into nothingness.<p>This isn&#x27;t to say that <i>personal opinions</i> need to be expressed in such absolutist terms to have impact, though. When you&#x27;re giving your <i>opinion</i>, you&#x27;re just telling people where <i>you</i> are on the spectrum. A reader can pretty easily tell—usually from the different writing style—what&#x27;s rhetoric and what&#x27;s personal thought; and while people engage with (i.e. debate with) rhetoric, they <i>compare themselves to</i> opinion. When I say &quot;I think the sky is purple&quot;, that&#x27;s not an argument; that&#x27;s a way of letting you know that if <i>you</i> think the sky is purple too, you&#x27;ve got someone to discuss that with.<p>HN seems to really like anecdote-rich &quot;humble&quot; presentations of (opinionated!) personal experience, but the persuasive essay has an important place as well. For every Folklore.org, there&#x27;s a Unix Hater&#x27;s Handbook. And although Folklore.org is certainly <i>entertaining</i>, I&#x27;ve never really seen a <i>productive</i> debate stem from a post there—certainly never anything that inspired someone to code up a new project to prove their point.