There’s a good way and a bad way to skin a cat. The good way is take the cat apart in a logical fashion. Put the skin to one side and the rest of the cat to the other. Then, you can make the skin into a nice hat, and make cat burgers with the meaty section. Maybe just throw out the parts you don’t need, like the head, tail and paws.
The bad way is to put the entire cat, fur and all, into a heavy duty blender, and chop it all into kitty salsa. While this will allow you to discover whether or not a cat will, in fact, blend, the result is no longer even recognizable as anything that originated as a cat. Instead you have a bloody mess. No one wants to see that shit. Also, it makes you look a bit like an asshole.
I was just now reading a thread in CS. I won’t link to it, because I don’t want to point fingers, so I’ll only say that it’s about a subject that sounds like “cereal”. Go look for it, because it’s illustrative. The most recent post in it was written as series of paragraphs which each made a distinct point. They were numbered. In a case like that, yeah, go right the heck ahead and reply by quoting and responding to each paragraph in turn. It’s the obvious way to do it, and it’s fine.
Above it, however, was a post which replied to another earlier post in the thread. This was an example of the kind of thing that drives some people nuts, where a paragraph which was clearly intended to be understood as a unified whole had been put through the blender. with each sentence then being separately nitpicked to death. That’s how not to do it. Actually, I think I’ll coin a term for this, (which will hopefully catch on, and make me famous): Post salad. And yeah, I scroll right past that stuff.
(BTW, no cats were harmed in the making of this post.)
I don’t think you can make a convincing argument that some post gives a good example without actually showing the example.
I assume you are talking about this post by brickbacon. If not, you need to be more specific. Not to hash the arguments of that post, but to address the claim that the post was “put through a blender”, i.e. hashed into nonsense, then I have to disagree. I haven’t been following that thread at all, but just looking at that post and maybe one or two around it, I find no fault at all in that approach. The comments were separated by relevance and as consistent thoughts. Separate points were addressed in each split. It is rational and sensible in my mind, and can’t see any reason why it should be irritating.
I read some GD, but rarely post there. Overall I echo the sentiments of the folks above who hold that “cut and post” (good moniker) *can *be a useful style, but is much more often misused (or deliberately used) to simply convert argument into sound-bites for easy counter-sound-biting.
In a polemic world where each side feels free to have their own set of facts as well as opinions, this style is ideal for reducing one’s opponent to frustrated sputtering. Or to convert their coherent arguments into what looks like frustrated sputtering, setting them up for easy ridicule.
So speaking just for myself … When I see a cut-n-post where the chunks quoted and/or the responses are small, I skip the post with extreme prejudice, and add an adverse reputation point to my personal opinion of the poster. Conversely I’ll at least read decent-sized chunks of quoted text with correspondingly sized chunks of rebuttal.
Visually, these things are ugly and remind me of the cable-news shows which I call round-table of interrupting shouting heads. Noisy, angering, utterly uninformative, and unpersuasive. I have very little in common with people who find that style entertaining, enlightening, or enriching.
Yeah, I think my biggest problem with the style (when used poorly), is that it just looks angry. It looks like a fight has broken out. My inclination is to scroll past it and make it to safety, in the same way that I keep my distance from people having a loud argument in the street. Maybe the discussion is interesting to the posters involved (or at least to the poster who’s doing the shouting, as the one on the receiving end could of course be entirely innocent), but as a third party, I’m getting out of there. Nothing to do with me, moving on.
If someone did it to me (and actually, come to think of it, someone has a couple of times, as part of a multi-poster-scrambling), I would just remove myself from the discussion. There’s no way I’m replying to that.
So it doesn’t seem like a very efficient way to get a point across or carry on a debate.
Which is weird to me, because it doesn’t look like a fight or screaming match to me necessarily - not based on the argument style. Rather, it looks like trying to break the arguments into sensible bits to address the comments directly instead of quoting seven paragraphs that were already posted in the thread and then trying to make comments about several points that were made in those seven paragraphs. That seems repetitious and confusing to me. I like to see the argument broken into separate pieces.
Of course I have noticed a tendency in myself to be repetitive in my replies, but then I tend to be repetitive in person as well.
Really? You find this easy to read, and not at all confrontational or annoying in any way?
(I didn’t want to point fingers, but since the poster I’m pointing at is already identified… well, what the heck. And it’s a better example of what I’m talking about the earlier one.)
The cut and paste arguments are for those who are more interested in winning fights than having interesting debates. When you have devolved into that bullshit you no longer want to hear anything new that might make you reconsider your position, you just want to stomp all over your opponents words.
Which leads to the biggest problem with that eye-glazing rubbish, its very exclusive. A cut and paste war means the thread is now dominated by two posters, it has become a cockfight into which a third person cannot offer any insight. Which isn’t very interesting now is it.
I just skim over those types of post, theres usually very little point in reading what is essentially a dick measuring contest between two other people.
I give up. How hard it is to get the point that it can be a good tool and yet sometimes be a bad one? Pointing out a bad example doesn’t negate the good ones. Skipping over every example is just as bad as saying tl;dr - some long posts are extremely valuable and you skip every one at your peril.
Stop making these silly blanket statements about things that can be good or bad individually.
Absolutely. One person doing it in a thread is bad enough, but when a second poster picks up the gauntlet and starts shooting back… yeah, it can just kill a thread, because all other posts just drown in the noise. There’s no point for a third party to even try to get a word in egdewise.
Which unfortunately just happened in the thread I was using as my example. Shame, it was a nice thread. Maybe I’ll go back some time later when the dust settles.
Okay, I pulled up your example, then pulled up the quoted post, then read the quoted first in whole, then read the example. Was it easy to read? Yes. Was it confrontational? Yes, but that was not because of the posting style, but rather because the two people are taking contentious positions about the material. Was it annoying in any way? I think there was maybe one element where you kinda have a point about the paragraph meant as a whole being sliced into one sentence. But brickbacon did not hyperparse each sentence of that statement differently. He selected one sentence from the paragraph about evaluating the case and made the counterargument that you only saw a tiny fragment of the actual evidence as presented, so you cannot fairly evaluate what really went down. He then took the analogy and made the same comment about evaluating a football defense performance by looking at snippets. So no, I don’t find it particularly annoying.
That may be your opinion, but it isn’t reality. When I post in threads, it is to have a conversation. If I’m sharing arguments, it is to make the arguments make sense. I have been known to take my side of the debate to task for their poor argument just as I have been known to concede a point by the opponent. Yet I use this style heavily, because it is the most organized style IMO.
That attitude is not reserved to cut and post type posting. It may be more obvious in some ways, but pigheadedness is not limited to one post style.
I will grant you, if two posters get locked into a back and forth, it can become more challenging for other posters to feel they can join in. But plenty of threads have two or more parallel and interwoven tracks of conversation relating to the same topic. A huge string of 1/2/1/2 posts makes it seem like they are dominating the talk, maybe by their enthusiasm influencing their posting frequency.
The important point is the person is wrong. How do you address the person being wrong? Decide to only say one way the person is wrong? Summarize with “you are wrong in every way and aren’t worth my time to try to explain your errors”?
Pick the one where you can make your argument most cogently and persuasively, or that you just find the most interesting for some reason. Say from the outset that you are picking one part, but that you think the rest is also wrong.
If you pick them all, you’ll convince pretty much no one. People seem to think that if the conversation is in writing, everyone’s going to be willing endlessly to review previous posts to remind themselves of what was said. Most people simply do not have the time/energy to do that to have a conversation on a message board. Use the quote feature to capture the relevant portions, reframe and rephrase to keep people up to speed on what your argument is, keep the topic relatively narrow including putting in reminders that you are keeping it narrow. Do all of this, and others will likely read your posts. Don’t do this and only the person you quoted will likely read them after a while, and that person, remember, is the wrongiest wronger who ever wronged.
Dude, sometimes people are wrong. Hell, most of the time people are wrong. That doesn’t mean that you have to roll up your sleeves and come over there every time. Because, I mean, we all have to live together on this board, and at some point you just have to let go of the anger, you know?
In other words, is it really worth it to start what looks like a shouting match and ruin the flow of a thread for everyone else just because someone happens to be a bit wrong?
The Serial thread is a bizarre case, BTW, because there is just nothing about the subject that is worth fighting over. Or even possible to fight over, as far as I can tell. And still some people manage to do it. It boggles the mind.
