Klarinet Archive - Posting 000401.txt from 1998/12

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] good posting
Date: Tue, 8 Dec 1998 10:16:30 -0500

Tony Pay wrote,

>Don't you guys have software to erase some of this stuff? I know I'm
behaving just as badly as y'all, for demonstration purposes, but I don't
usually. (Though some people think I behave badly in other ways;-) Good
(clarinet) playing is about elegance. So is good posting.>

[Looooong snip of material demonstrating that somebody had quoted a lengthy
thread of messages in full, instead of excerpting from them....]

Good point. Maybe people are particularly nervous about seeming to quote out
of context right now? I think many of these excessive quotations happen by
accident, though, because sometimes an entire Digest gets recycled. Surely
nobody intends to quote the Administratrivia! Some list members may not
realize that in "Reply" mode, a lot of e-mail software automatically appends
and returns the whole original message, even though it may not show up on the
user's "Write" screen. That function may be a courtesy in private e-mail, but
it sure can mess up an e-list.

Some software allows the user to change the default e-mail preferences, but to
avoid the problem otherwise, just save the message, then select the necessary
quotations in word processing software, write the reply, save it in the "ASCII
delimited text" format (so the word processor won't force hard line breaks,
add a bunch of non-text symbols or otherwise transmit gibberish), then e-mail
the post as a new message, instead of using the Reply function. I prefer to
compose mail in my word processor anyway, because it's got much better editing
tools, and because I can read and write off-line instead of tying up the
phone.

Lelia
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"As a man grows more mature, it seems that he has a greater longing to be more
economical wiht his means, in order to achieve simplicity."
--Bela Bartok, interviewed in _The Etude_, 1941.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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