Now that I no longer require registration for commenting, we have a much wider and diverse group of commenters. Unfortunately, it also means that many of the same logical and rhetorical errors that we see all over the blogosphere have come home to roost.
Thus for your help and edification, I present to you the You Read It Right: Complete Blog Commenting Guidelines via The Rebelution and Dawn Eden of the Dawn Patrol. From this point on, these guidelines will now be operative and you will be expected to follow them. I’m not saying you’ll necessarily be banned or have your comment deleted if don’t, but don’t expect me to answer you. I may, in fact, say “You broke rule number 6, come back when you fix it.”
As a further aid, I will also point you to a more general resource on Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate. Learn all the classical fallacies like “argumentum ad hominem” and “post hoc ergo propter hoc” and, one of my favorites, “the straw man.” (Don’t fret, they have English translations for those of you like me who don’t read Latin.)
Read them, learn them, love them and we’ll all get along nicely.
An example: Improving your skills of argumentation
