Conversely, I'm now in the habit of asking big "obvious" or "dumb" questions; questions that will highlight assumptions being made by each party. I'll often go slow at first to establish that these large unspoken thoughts are aligned and then work my way down to lower levels of detail until we hit an actual disagreement, rather than a mere misunderstanding.
It drives me crazy to spend 30 minutes arguing with someone only to find that "Wait, you're talking about THAT? I thought we were talking about THIS."
It's too common for people to find themselves arguing in the direction of the same general concept, but differences in their understanding/interpretation will diverge more and more the farther you get into the discussion. It's so helpful to lay out terms at the start when possible.
My wife works in governance, and when a proposed new policy is being discussed, she is always the one to say "so, how would the policy work in this situation, with these people involved? [Outlines a situation.] Tell me the steps."
And, of course, the elegant, abstract policy is shown to be unworkable or lead to manifestly unfair or absurd outcomes.
I admire my wife's patience greatly.
If we aren't using the same terminology, we can't possibly communicate ideas.
Visual analogy: take a cylinder floating in the middle of the room, and a single light source you move around. As you move the light around, it'll cast shadows of very different shapes. This is merely projecting a 3D object to 2D, but if all anyone in the argument has is a single snapshot of a shadow, you could see how a person seeing a circle might have trouble agreeing with a person seeing a rectangle - and yet they're still talking about the same thing.
(The biggest hurdle is to get people to realize their view on a topic is a low-dimensional projection of a high-dimensional thing, and not just the thing - and that to do something productive with it, one must be willing to "walk around" a bit, project to different bases.)
People are resistant to that though. If I'm being generous I think they think it's just saving time, because they 'know' the right answer. But the melancholy cynic in me wonders if it is just ego.