Overview & Mission
Welcome to SEN's Serious Discussion forum. The goal of the Serious Discussion and these rules is to foster an environment fit for a higher caliber of intelligent discussion and debate not found in the other forums. While we do not wish to establish a professional or formal debate team, posts in the Serious Discussion forum will be measured against stricter rules and higher standards.


Serious Discussion Rules

1. Attitude and Atmosphere. Be respectful and courteous of each other at all times. Flaming, or Ad hominem, slander, and trolling are all unacceptable in Serious Discussion. Do not make verbal attacks on others. Do not demean or antagonize others. Do not add superfluous sarcasm or mocking to your posts. Do not post in ways that are disruptive to discussion. Ideas and argument are to be attacked, not people. However, this does not mean that you have a carte blanche to write superfluous diatribe directed at an argument -- attacks on arguments must still remain tasteful and proportional.

2. Be Reasonable. The world does not revolve around you and your opinions. Merely asserting you are right without reasoning or evidence is disruptive. While debate is encouraged, a few people continually claiming they are right without any new evidence or argumentation is not debate. Please remain open minded and do not argue for the sake of arguing. Serious Discussion is not intended to feed the ego or prove who is smarter than someone else. You are expected to entertain all relevant possibilities and give them a fair evaluation, even though you may find them discomforting or displeasing. We all make errors and mistakes, which we must be willing to admit and correct.

3. Sources and Evidence. If something is beyond the scope of "common knowledge", please provide sufficent evidence, sources and references to back up your claim. If you are unsure of whether or not what you are posting is common knowledge, it is advisable to err on the side of caution and provide them anyway.

4. Use Proper Grammar. L33t speak and other internet shortforms will not be tolerated. (example, "u" for "you" and "no1" for "no-one".) Proper capitalization, punctuation, and seperation of ideas into sentences and paragraphs is expected. Infrequent misspellings or missing commas are not a major problem, but your posts will be deleted if your grammar is poor. If you would like to learn more about correct grammar, please look up reputable sources on Google and see the links of interest below.

5. Clarity and Effort. Please do not be unnecessarily ambiguous or deceptive in your posts. It is disruptive when there is a debate spanning a large amount of posts when you could have simply explained it well at the beginning. You will be held to what you SAY, not what you MEAN. If you do not have time or are not willing to put forth the effort to fully formulate and develop an idea, don't post. Posts judged to be of a low quality or high ambiguity will be deleted at moderation's discretion. Posting in the SD with high quality will take a good amount of time. Consider not posting at all if you are trying to cut corners. This means that if you don't fully read the entire topic, or intentionally submit poorly-formulated posts you are contributing to the SD in a negative fashion.

6. Do Not Spam. Do not post useless or irrelevant information. This old adage applies here: A wise man speaks when he has something to say, a fool speaks because he has to say something. Do not post non-sequitors or silly jokes unless they are in good taste and contribute to the discussion. Try not to take a discussion off topic. If you and others wish to pursue the off-topic tangents of a discussion, you are welcome to open a new topic.
Avoid restatements. Unless there has been a genuine misinterpretation of your post, reasserting your point without sufficent additional content, evidence or argumentation will neither make your point true nor contribute to discussion.

7. For New Topics. When opening a new thread, please ensure that your topic is fully developed. A new topic should provide a solid foundation for discussion. A substantial claim or argument relevant to your topic must be provided. Note that this requirement is not intended to limit the focus of a topic, but rather to ensure that there is substantial material for discussion.
Simple opinions, news updates, "(insert link), discuss.", "Ask me anything about X", etc., are not acceptable as new topics.


Staredit Network Rules
The Terms of Service and The Rules still apply in Serious Discussion.


Links of Interest

On Grammar
http://www.bartleby.com/141/ -- The Elements of Style, by William Strunk, Jr. This is a reprint from 1918, as more recent versions are subject to copyright.

On Debating
How to build an argument: http://jerz.setonhill.edu/writing/argument/building.html
How to build an argument, avoiding logical fallacies: http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/mathew/logic.html (The logic of this site is correct; the examples they use may offend you.)

On Persuasion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modes_of_persuasion The three components required for effective arguementation.
A. Credentials (Qualifications and why they are important.)
B. Emotions (The more emotion involved, the more powerful the message.)
C. Logic (If it's not logical, no one will listen to it.)

On Fallacies
On Logical Fallacies -- http://www.ramdac.org/fallacies.php
Logical Fallacies and the Art of Debate -- http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html
Fallacy Files -- http://www.fallacyfiles.org/
Wikipedia's Article -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy

All sites are equally valid; each contain an introduction on why logical fallacies are important and why you should avoid them. Read this portion at least once!

Post has been edited 15 time(s), last time on May 19 2011, 10:47 am by CecilSunkure. Reason: Updated rule #5.