Re: top posting?

Craig James <cjames(at)emolecules(dot)com> writes:
> I've been participating in newsgroups since UUCP days, and I've never
> encountered a group before that encouraged bottom posting. Bottom posting
> has traditionally been considered rude -- it forces readers to scroll,
> often through pages and pages of text, to see a few lines of original
> material.

Quoting entire messages is rude, IMO, no matter where you attach your
comments. What is respectful of your readers' time is to quote just
enough to remind them what you're responding to. And once you do that,
it's more natural to append your responses after what you're responding
to.

I'm aware that there are a whole lot of people nowadays who don't get
this element of email etiquette, or who use tools that make it hard
to do things that way (suggesting that the tool authors don't get it
either). But that's what's been considered good style for about
three decades, in my book.

> The most efficient strategy, one that respects other members' time, is to
> briefly summarize your point at the TOP of a posting, then to *briefly*
> quote only the relevant parts of the post to which you are replying, and
> bottom-post after the quoted text.

I think we're on the same page, actually, except for the brief-summary
bit. I'm not sure that a brief summary without context is really all
that efficient or intelligible. It's probably a tenable approach if
there's only a few threads going on at a time, but how often is that a
good assumption? I guess in an ideal world the Subject: line would
provide enough context ... but people aren't terribly good about picking
good subjects to start with, and they're positively bad about adjusting
the Subject: when the thread diverges into sub-topics.

regards, tom lane