Re: A Different Format for Postings
Well, if it's left totally up to me, I plan on leaving it totally up to everyone else. So if you want to comment on everything in a particular section, then I have no objection to your starting a thread about that section.
Having looked over the last few quarterly discussions, though, I've seen (and contributed) to two trends. One trend, particularly in the "Virtue and Value" discussion, was commenting on everything in a given section at once, which leads to long posts, with long replies. That puts us in a situation that several people have complained about, and I can totally understand how it might be daunting to someone to drop into a thread and see even three or four really long posts. And at the same time, I can see not wanting to really get involved in a thread that covers 50-100 pages without first reading all of those pages -- you don't want to reply to comments about a section until you've read that section yourself. So it's fairly natural to want to comment on everything in a section at once. One solution would be to deal with smaller sections, and we could certainly do that here, but having 60-something pre-made threads is likely to lead to chaos. So I think the simplest solution is to just let the units be determined by our interest. If I have comment about an entire chapter, I can certainly start a thread about that chapter. If I have a comment about a single passage within a much larger chapter, then the fact that I've found something of interest there is an indication that others might be attracted to the same topic.
The other trend, more common in "The End of Faith" discussion, was that we diverged pretty quickly from the content of the chapter itself and veered off on tangents that we found more interesting. Which is great, but when a person is catching up with the rest of the group and they scan the end of a 4-page thread to see what the comments are like, they may find themselves wondering what the hell our discussion had to do with what they read. Those kind of tangents are inevitable, and best handled if we're encouraged to start new threads as we please. And I think the really flexible treatment that I'm suggesting is more likely to encourage that; having pre-made threads seems to suggest coloring within the lines, even when we're coloring in incongruent shapes.
If we go that route, though, I do think it would be courteous to everyone else if each person that started a thread began the first post with a tiny note pointing out what passage in the book inspired the thread. For instance, I might start a thread with a question about Saudi Arabia, and preface that question with something like, "Chapter 16 got me thinking..." That kind of thing would make it easier for people to know whether or not the thread they're reading is likely to pertain to anything they've read in the book so far, or whether they should hold off until later. And we should be careful to give the threads titles that indicate their content; a title like "British policy in the Middle East" will be easier to size up then a title like "What a bunch of crap!" I'm not suggesting any kind of rules, but considerations like these ought to make the discussion simpler to follow.
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