Please go ahead and write your article! I'd be very interested in reading about this kind of thing. Even if part of debating is black arts stuff with winning the debate' rather than search for thruth no matter where she lies (to put it a bit melodramatic), it's good at least to be good at recognizing* the tricks.
The same is true for amusing, easy-reading stuff like The Game or The 48 laws of Power; you don't want to take it too serious, but it's good to be aware of it, as one can observe some of it in daily life, and understanding helps. That's not meant as sarcasm -- I'm interested in what you learned about debating, and hopefully I can learn something from it.
I'm newly subscribed but looking to contribute, and I was wondering if anyone would be interested in an article (or series thereof) teaching, in a formal and well-defined manner, how to argue. It would cover things like:
There are two reasons why I think such an article might be helpful for this community: Firstly because having learned those skills you could apply them in the privacy of your own head, both to your own arguments and those of others, which in my experience gives a huge boost to critical thinking ability. Secondly because I think most of this community would like to actually make the world a saner place, and those skills are really handy when trying to explain to some intelligent-but-uninitiated schlub why a given silly belief or deduction is in fact silly, or conversely why any of the tools of rationality we use here are in fact rational. It's not magic, but it helps.
It might also improve the level of discourse on the site, of course, but frankly the level of actual argument here is really high in comparison to that of most real-world forums (let alone most Internet forums), and I'd guess with about .75 certainty that nothing I could teach would make it noticeably "better" (a higher growth rate for the function describing the probability of reaching truth as dependent on resources spent arguing). But at the moment I'm inclined to attribute that to the kind of people doing the arguing, rather than the training they have.
And yes, I've noticed articles here that touch on the subject, like Yudkowsky's on inferential distances or language, but I haven't seen anyone having the hubris to try and cover the entire subject in broad strokes. Hubris is a personal speciality of mine.
If this would be helpful, and particularly if there's anything you feel should fall under this heading that I missed in the above list, please say so. If you don't think such an article would be helpful, also please say so. Two reasons I've considered for why that might be the case:
PS: No, of course it's not a good idea to finish an argument with reasons that it's likely to be wrong! Who told you to do that?