Western-style arguments generally have clear winners and losers. However, in human relationships, losers tend to resent winners and people would often rather lie to themselves than admit their side isn't right. This emotional corollary to having triumphant winners and humiliated losers has led to millions of divorces and at least one world war, and it limits the value of argument as a means of discovering truth. In the end of this millennium we have an extremely urgent need to learn to figure out how all sides can have the maximum amount of satisfaction. The Modern Classical Argument Modern arguments follow many organizational patterns including patterns which are unique to the given subject, but nearly all modern, Western-style arguments have sections, in whatever order, which can be identified as exordiums , narratios , confirmatios , confutatios , and peroratios .
Most introductions are a combination of an exordium and a narratio .
Most arguments profit by having some summarizing and strong statements at the end like the Greeks would have responded to in a peroratio . In a speech, the exordium is likely to be handled by the introduction a speaker is given. A speaker may do some work on his ethos by telling a few jokes at the beginning of a speech, no matter how serious the speech will become later. This has the important psychological function of getting the audience on the side of the speaker. A successful joke, however, makes it more psychologically difficult for an audience to disagree about serious points later.