Advice for "influencers"

In his excellent book, Who's Speaking, Fr. Cliff Ermatinger gives the following guidance:

The defensive, stubborn, polemic spirit reveals a spirit less than divine. (p.61)

The root idea of polemics is to aggressively argue for your own position and against another by especially presenting the opponent's position in its weakest form or by only highlighting the negative aspects. 

The more charitable approach gives the opponent his due by presenting his argument in its strongest form and acknowledging the good aspects. This has recently been dubbed "to steel-man" an argument, to distinguish it from a straw-man argument. St. Thomas Aquinas is often presented as a master of steel-manning. He only occasionally gets his hackles up and engages in polemics, mostly in the form of saying the Thomistic equivalent of, "Ha!"