[Air-l] messages and digests

[Barry Wellman]

James Watt's posting re 'Do Not Quote the Entire Message in Your Reply'
was welcome to me.

But I started thinking that the annoyance level of this depends on the
form in which people receive messages.

Something else for lingusitic/communication folks to analyze, perhaps.

Watt and I are digest readers, and it is a PITA to plow through a series
of quoted full-length replies.

On the other hand, if folks are getting one message at a time, it is much
less annoying, and perhaps even useful to quote full messages. You read
the reply and enough of the quoted message to get context.

So the medium affects the usefulness of the message;-)

I wonder how many readers of this list are digest readers or one-at-a-time
readers.

Barry

PS: It is also an undisputed PITA to plow thru HTML after plain ASCII,
which too many folks do also: turn that HTML off, svp.


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  Barry Wellman        Professor of Sociology       NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca   http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

  Centre for Urban & Community Studies        University of Toronto
  455 Spadina Avenue   Toronto Canada M5S 2G8   fax:+1-416-978-7162
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