Discussion Groups / British English / May 2007

Face it, you'll never sound better on usenest than a skilled troll.
Anyway, arguing is not (or rather, should not be) about scoring points
but about getting to the truth; if your opponent isn't interested in
that, you'd be better walking away than letting it get to you.

I seem to get trolls attacking me almost every time I post but just
stick to my guns - and the truth. That's the important bit: to thine
own self be true (and all that stuff).

tonyjeffs:

unless you feel at ease responding in kind, take Schopenhauer's
advice and avoid arguments with `the common ruck of people'; such
arguments will only drag you into chicanery.

i recommend _The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation_ by
Chaïm Perelmam and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, the depth and the
coverage of which surpasses that of _The Art of Controversy_.

--
Jock

Having read the posts in reply to your question
I did a quick search for forums devoted to the
arts of rhetoric, on the basis that you may not
be able to.

Two that I found were a umn (university of
minnesota) newsgroup--suggesting that it's only
really the UK contingent of JANET which has
pulled all their groups so as to promote login
secured proprietary solutions for which seat
licenses must be purchased per head.

google only lists one subscriber to this group
but there is an archive. Similarly, there is a
LISTSERV active devoted to rhetoric hosted on
the MAELSTROM mail server at STJOHNS EDUcational
site.

Address e-mails in the first instance to the
listserv itself and use the ubiquitous e-mail
"AT" symbol to reliably direct your e-mail to
the hosted mailserver, building the address
using each of the capitalised terms as above
in the order given above with a full stop character
between each one following the "AT" character.

In the first instance the body of your message
need only read HELP.

This information is given on the basis that no
further support can be offered generic listserv
applications hosted on remote machines.

However I suspect that what you want is not
really information on the art of rhetoric,
which originated with Aristotle, and is keyed
into formally addressing audiences in order to
persuade them on a one-to-many basis.

As such I did a quick search on "debate", purely
on the grounds it's actually rather closer to
what you're looking for.

A lot of the resources are aimed at students and
available as http:// protocol "web" pages. I'm
sure if you managed to post here that you'd be
able to conduct a search of this nature and
there were the by now entirely normal several
hundred thousand pages of "hits".

My feeling is that debating forums, whether they
happen to be publically or privately owned, are
far more likely to yield the kinds of strategic
and tactical gems you may find worthwhile.

I say this because "debate" still has a very
active, participatory, connotation whereas, in
all fairness, rhetoric tends to be something
"they" push onto "us"--they being The Powers
That Be and which, these days, has an almost
overwhelmingly negative connotation.

In many ways the arts of rhetoric are traditionally
geared up to structures within written texts
however as many kids, allegedly, leave school
understanding little more than that a "rhetorical
question" is a polite way of couching "sarcasm"
(which it isn't, but hey, it's not like I'm
a teacher so take that with a pinch of NaCl)
and rhetoric is something politics rests on,
which again it isn't really, I figured delving
into "debate" might better suit your immediate
ends.

Obviously there are strong paralinguistic elements
in many forms of debate and of rhetoric which
get lost in the proceedings of, say, HANSARD
but some of the speeches have been recycled
so many times that any formal pointers toward
structuralism you may find in your wider reading
on the subject are likely to be found within its
Parliamentary digests (as opposed to the often
rather more interesting and markedly less formal
stuff that goes on in committee rooms and so
forth).

HTH

G DAEB

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