Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1997/12/02
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> On 1 Dec 97, Gary Todoroff wrote:
> > BTW, would people please put their e-mail responses *above* the text
> > that prompts your e-mail? That way we don't have to scroll down
> > through a familiar message to see your words of wisdom.
At Mon, 1 Dec 1997 21:31:24 -0700, "Roger Beamon" <beamon@primenet.com> wrote:
> What say you, subscribers? Is this the better way?
The nearly universal convention in email and netnews is, and has long been,
to quote small snippets of earlier text (just the text you're responding to
directly) for context, and then to wade into your response. If the quoting
is sufficiently selective, and set off with the also-conventional greater-than
signs at the left margin, it's no hardship for the reader's eye to skip over
the few lines of quoted text, and the discourse benefits by being tightly
focused.
When people invert the convention as Mr. Todoroff suggests, I find it very
confusing, and have to work at understanding what's going on. I'm distracted
from the content by the form.
The power of using typographic conventions so familiar as to be invisible to
the reader, whether they concern layout or capitalization or letterforms or
spelling or anything else, is that they enhance, rather than distract from,
the easy flow of information. Or, to quote Henry Spencer's classic ``Ten
Commandments for C Programmers'':
8. Thou shalt make thy program's purpose and structure clear to
thy fellow man by using the One True Brace Style, even if thou
likest it not, for thy creativity is better used in solving
problems than in creating beautiful new impediments to
understanding.
It's about the content. Except in those publications devoted explicitly to
exploring the bounds of typography as its own art, typography should usually
lie low and do its best to lubricate the flow of ideas into the reader's
brain.
Note the phrase, `the few lines of quoted text' in my first paragraph above.
There's no excuse for quoting an entire long previous post verbatim, headers,
signature and all, then responding to only a small part of it or appending
``Me, too!''. Squandering the attention and bandwidth of many readers
because the writer hasn't bothered to trim and reformat properly is not
merely lazy, it's rude: it implies that the writer feels the time he'd have
had to spend crafting a tight posting (and, if necessary, setting up the
software needed to make crafting a tight posting convenient) is more valuable
than the time all the readers of his posting will waste reading something
sloppy. And it inspires people to suggest breaking with established
conventions as a workaround for what is really a problem of editing.
- --------------
Just as there's no excuse for sloppy quoting, there's little excuse for
taking the bait and ranging so far off the list's stated topic as I have
in this post. I apologize, and swear I'll talk about Leicas next.
-Jeff M.