Ron Johnson wrote:
the vast unwashed masses just think we're a bunch of kooks and will
continue to top-post no matter how much we lecture them, because that's
how Outlook and web mail works.
No. It's because they are lazy and stupid when it comes to email (no matter
what their other virtues may or may not be).
These are the same people that, when you ask them two questions in an email,
invariably will answer the first and ignore the second. They're the same
people who invariable will reply with four word sentences missing punctuation
-- and that was *before* smart phones. I hate to see what the smart phone is
doing to business correspondence.
These are the people who, if you teach them to interleave their replies with
the quoted text, will reply to a two page email by quoting the ENTIRE two
pages followed by "Me to!!!1!" at the bottom.
Outlook is not the cause of the problem. Outlook is a symptom of the problem.
The reality is that they will think we're kooks even if we top-post, because
we write in complete sentences using punctuation and grammar.
With care, people are perfectly capable of writing coherent, sensible replies
using top posting. Before the invention of email, replies to letters didn't
include the original post *at all*, and people managed to cope. I've recently
been writing to a friend via snail mail, and although it's a little awkward
sometimes without the automatic quoting for context, it is possible to
communicate effectively by what is essentially top posting without the quoted
text. People managed it for centuries.
So the real problem is not that top posting is bad, but people are bad at top
posting. And if they're bad at top posting, chances are that they will be
equally bad at inline (interleaved) posting.
The people that I don't get are the ones -- rare, but it does happen -- who
somehow manage to reply in such a way that *their* text is also quoted. WTF?
--
Steven
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