Re: Federal Rules of Evidence

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:32:34 EDT, you said:

How far would the civil rights movement have gotten with that attitude?

Top-posting (especially without trimming extraneous stuff) ends up being
like The Amazing Karnak - you're left wondering which of your three
paragraphs this sentence is in fact not a direct reply to. More importantly,
which paragraph was *my* previous paragraph an actual direct reply to?

> Not to get into a philosophical debate, but if a significant demographic
> operate a certain way for whatever reason, perhaps you should change
> your expectations rather than asking the entire group to change on your
> behalf?

Sure, 40K and 2 small images may not be much, but  I'm sure that a number of
mail admins would be singing a totally different tune if the same people who
didn't bother trimming out two small images then also didn't bother to delete
an 8 megabyte movie file that was also attached when they sent their "<aol>me
too</aol>".  And there's something to be said for being polite enough to trim
out the intervening text.  Yes, sometimes an e-mail may get lenghty and require
a long reply - but at this point this entire commentary is still around 60 lines
or so - while some of the "me too" postings are now over 125 lines without even
the benefit of '>' nesting markers.

What's wrong with this picture?

> Is a 40k email really a significant  issue in this day and age with such
> things as streaming media?  Bandwidth and digital storage are also many
> times what they were a decade or so ago.

Bottom-posting and trimming is a Good Idea, because if you reply to an e-mail
that has 3 action items, and you bottom-post after the one you intend to
address and trim the other two, the reader can immediately infer that you will
do one of the three.  You stick a "I'll get right on this" on the top, and now
the reader needs to send a *second* note to clarify which item(s) will be
gotten right on.

In addition, *trimming* the text is a good idea *whether or not* you are top or
bottom - because by trimming, you indicate that the trimmed material is not
germane to your reply.  In the previous paragraph's example, even if you
top-posted a "I'll get right on this", if you trimmed two action items, the
reader can infer you're not planning to tackle those two.

>  I know 'Nix users  and other old schoolers have a post bottom creed of plain
> text, but you are holding on to an ideal whose time has past.  I too pushed
> back on such things for countless years, but I learned this is not something
> that can be "fixed".

And if you found *this* note hard to read, consider what would have happened if
I had put *all* of my response at the top, not merely above the paragraph I was
responding to...

I suppose if your e-mail universe consists of merely people doing +1s and "me
toos" and other one-line commentary, it's hard to get the people to Do The
Right Thing when their MUA causes them to Do The Wrong Thing by default. But
that doesn't mean that those of us who are still trying to use e-mail for
serious discussions shouldn't keep fighting for people to use conventions more
suitable for said discussions.

PS: if Outlook had from the beginning done bottom-post and use ">" markers by
default, would we even be *having* this discussion?  Too many people are
conflating "what is actually best" with "what my tool does by default and I'm
too busy/lazy/stupid to change it". Doing something due to user inertia is not
the same thing as doing something because it's actually best.

Attachment: _bin
Description: