Re: [tlug] Quoting...yet again

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > I think that there are two sides to this. One is that people do
 > consider this a different communications medium:

If my students are any sample, they take equal care with email and
with word-processed documents.  Which is to say, nearly none.  (I
guess you have that covered under the rubric "insensitive to style".)

 > final editing pass; I'd never consider that for an essay to be published
 > in the New York Times. :-)

I'm surprised you'd consider the NYT an acceptable venue! ;-)

 > Another is just lack of consideration for readers, or lack of
 > understanding that you should have consideration. Spending five
 > minutes to save the reader 10 seconds doesn't seem like a good
 > trade-off,

But the thing is that in fact trimming takes about the same order of
magnitude of time you save *one* reader.  I think the real problem
here is that people think that Tbird and Eudora and Outlook and
Emacs/Rmail are actually good MUAs, and they haven't bothered to find
out what a real MUA can do for you.  They're not just complete
newbies, either---there's a very important contingent on the
emacs-devel list that objects to use of the References header for
threading!  (Where "very important" is spelled "RMS uses Rmail too,"
although he personally hasn't weighed in on the References header.)

If you have an editor that requires your hand to leave the keyboard to
do a block delete, and your editor is a piece of Ecmascript anyway,
and by default your editor yanks the whole message and leaves the
cursor at the top, well, that's a lot to fight.

And in business, I think it *does* make sense to top-post in many
cases.  The line pukes and kakari-cho fight it out until they come to
a decision, at which point you CC the bu-cho.  He reads the first few
lines of the last post by the person he trusts most, and 95% of the
time makes a decision right there.  If not, he's going to drill down a
level of quote or two until he finds a reason to decide, and 99.5% of
the time by now he's made a decision.  Having it all in the current
post makes sense (if you've got the bandwidth to spare and *everybody*
top-posts *religiously*), even if you know you've got a few iterations
before Da Boss gets to it.

I think that's a terrible way to run a list like TLUG, of course, but
I can see some logic in the business world.  I wonder what my old man
(you remember, the guy who would take a history major over an MBA any
day) would say about that, though.

 > unless you both realize that 150 people are going to read your
 > post, and you care to optimize the commons rather than your own
 > personal time.

Or maybe you simply realize that well-written posts actually get
read by 150 people, and the others by 1.5 (and what's worse, the .5 is
Dogbert ... uh-oh!)