A good debate question - Page 5

If the debate question could be answered objectively, in terms of verifiable facts and figures, then there is not much to debate there. If the answer to the debate question is subjective, laced with personal opinions and interpretations, I don't see much point to debating. You could exhort, you could plead, you could intimidate, and none of that rhetoric will turn fiction to fact or fact to fiction. If you are only interested in pitting the logical consistency of one argument against another, then too it would degenerate into a word play, sans verifiable facts. Why do you think most debates all across the world in legislative assemblies and parliaments turn into verbal/fist fights? Because, they cannot reach a consensus. And the reason they can't reach a consensus is because they are short on facts and long on rhetoric.

Some of the chit chat in debate threads I don't mind, because it's easy to skip all of that if you want and get to the meatier posts.

But it is hard on my eyes and ends up kind of irritating me when people quote long posts. Especially when there is a quote within a quote. And the use of different colours. Angie - you do this a lot! Not trying to single you out, but that shade of blue isn't easy to read when there are several lines of text. I like reading your posts, just wish it was not in bright colours.

Especially chit chat comments, I really wish wouldn't do the quoting. It just makes the thread unwieldy as you scroll down blocks and blocks of multicolour text.

That's just me. Nowhere else to post this, so I picked this thread.

^^ Some Reasons that I could think of why people use nestled quotes-

1- Saves them the trouble to edit the earlier quotes

2- The earlier quote may be necessary to convey the right context to the reply

Coming to the reasons for using different colored fonts-

Ease of differentiating the replies and the original post, especially while addressing several parts of a long post

Blue color gets used most commonly because it is thought to be less strenuous on the eye at the same time maintaining contrast between the reply and the quote making it easy to distinguish the two.

From my observation the preference for the colors in a descending order range from black, blue, red , pink followed by others

Italics or larger /bold fonts in same (black) color could be used but while accessing a long post it can create some confusion since the original post may contain words in italics or bold.

It gets more difficult when we have a rainbow of colors used to reply to earlier replies in a different color. I however feel that it is better to quote those portions separately instead of using multiple colors one after the other in the same quote to reply, then reply the reply and so on'as one can easily lose track of the chronology of colors being used.

Using separate quotes while replying should be the better thing to do in the first place but it gets tedious to put the parts of a long post into several separate quotes, moreover at times the quoting mechanism on IF acts quite funny!

As for chatting on the threads a few occasional chats and straying from the topic is acceptable but I agree that it should be kept to a minimum.