Everyone,
When you reply to a message (especially a long posting of the sort that is all too common here on r.m.r), will you please do the other participants in this September forum the courtesy of taking a few moments to trim the quoted material, leaving only the relevant portions?
It is a waste of bandwidth, time, and hard drive space to have to wade through 650-line posts with only 10 lines or less of new material. The common feature of many newsreaders to automatically quote the contents of the article to which you are responding is intended as a convenience, as it is simpler to snip out irrelevancies than to copy and paste relevant text. It is not intended as an inducement to top-post and/or fail to properly trim follow-ups.
Including relevant portions of the article to which you are replying provides context for your replies, and is admirably helpful, given the quirky and uncertain propagation of usenet articles. However, simply copying everything which has ever been said before on a topic is not helpful, and provides few or none of the contextual benefits of limited quoting.
For easiest readability:
1) Keep your line lengths under 70-75 characters, to allow for multiple levels of quoting without word wrapping.2) Preserve attributions for quoted material.
3) Trim quoted material so that its length is "just right" -- you should keep enough to preserve context for your reply, but should trim away anything irrelevant.4) Place your replies directly beneath the material to which you are replying. This makes it easiest for your reader to see what you are talking about, and conforms with the usual and expected "top to bottom" narrative chronology, especially when there are multiple "levels" of replies.
5) If large sections of quoted text are relevant to your reply, consider paraphrasing. Don't misrepresent your summary as a quote, but simply say something like "[snipped excellent, but long, argument in favor of X by Y]", and place your comments directly below your summary. This places your words in context, without requiring 3 pages of quotations to do so.6) Make appropriate use of whitespace. Unbroken expanses of text are difficult to read, and likely to be mentally "skipped over" by your readers. Separate your paragraphs.
7) When finished, reread what you wrote before you hit "send". A moment or two spent proofreading can help you catch the more obvious sort of grammar, spelling errors, or typos that we all make from time to time, and can help preserve the readability and comprehensability of your text.I'm not trying to be a "style nazi" or anything like that. What I am trying to do is encourage people here to take a few moments up front to ensure that their comments, responses, arguments, and (gasp!) on-topic posts are given the best chance possible to be read, understood, and appreciated by the other people who participate here.
Writing clear, concise prose, and providing a reasonable level of context to one's words is not difficult, and can help make participating in the discussions here a more enjoyable and informative process for everyone.
Besides, excessive quoting leads to top-posting, and top-posting is evil.
Thanks for listening,
- Rick "Common courtesy" Dickinson