Full quotes / curtesy

[John Rudd]

On Jun 8, 2004, at 4:18 AM, Michele Neylon :: Blacknight Solutions
wrote:

> If you had a gmail account you'd understand :)

Does gmail suddenly reach out to everyone else's computers and force
them to write netiquette compliant messages? and communicate in clear
and concise langauge?  :-)

It's not about how the message gets displayed, nor about how much you
may or may not have infinite disk space for storing them (nor is "disk
is cheap" the appropriate answer), it's about the right and wrong
styles and attitudes in communication.


I know I sometimes get lazy (due to being busy and not feeling I have
the time to do a good editing job), or I decide to adopt the style of
the previous sender (if they top post, sometimes I top post), but that
doesn't mean it's ok.  Trimming quotes down to the essentials is really
the right thing to do, not for disk space reasons, but for clarity
reasons.  And while many of us might like to feel that "content matters
more than presentation", the reality is that if you don't pay enough
attention to presentation to make your message accessible, then your
content will end up being lost somewhere along the line.

And that's what it's really about: making your post accessible to the
reader is "polite", and not making it accessible to the reader is
"rude".  What leaps and bounds you have to take to "make it accessible"
depends up on the audience, but those dependencies have to do with
things like "how much you explain terms and use english instead of
equations".  The hoops that are always appropriate are things like
"formatting" and "trimming" (meaning "no top posting" and "getting rid
of non-essential quote lines").

(and if your assertion is that gmail has a presentation format that
does the formatting and trimming for you, I'd find it hard to believe
that it has enough NLP to correctly choose what to trim and what not to
trim ...  if your assertion is instead "disk is cheap, gmail gives you
1 gig for free, so stop worrying about trimming", then you've
completely missed the entire concept of netiquette and probably ought
to go review basic concepts in courtesy and communication, not to
mention that it's entirely rude to decide how someone else's storage
space should or shouldn't be used (such as by cluttering it with lots
of redundant quotes))

-------------------------- MailScanner list ----------------------
To leave, send    leave mailscanner    to jiscmail at jiscmail.ac.uk
Before posting, please see the Most Asked Questions at
http://www.mailscanner.biz/maq/     and the archives at
http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/mailscanner.html