Re: New to group
- From: Joy Beeson <jbeeson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 02 Jan 2008 23:04:05 -0500
A brief primer on something that's been known to baffle the
experienced:
Some newsgroups use "bottom posting" -- you quote the whole thread to
date and add your comments at the bottom. In a support newsgroup,
this allows a person who comes in late to read just the last post to
find out what fixes have already been tried and suggest something new.
Some newsgroups use "top posting" -- just like business e-mail, you
write your comments, then append the entire thread to date so that
people can look up any forgotten points without hunting around for the
file copies of the previous letters. I don't read any of the
newsgroups that use this convention, so I have no idea what makes it
useful on Usenet.
Most newsgroups use "quote and response" posting. This means that you
quote *only* the part of the post that you intend to respond to, and
write your response under the quote. If you respond to more that one
part of the message, you write more than one quote and response --
this is sometimes called "interleaving your remarks", but that sounds
rather as though you were expected to quote the *entire* post, which
you would do only if the entire post is needed to understand your
remarks.
Quote-and-response posting takes a certain amount of skill
-- there's a beginner on another of my newsgroups who is frantically
oscillating between quoting too much and quoting nothing;
I've made a thirty-day killfile to guarantee that my impatience won't
lead me to say something discouraging. (There happen to be plenty of
good teachers on that newsgroup, and I should stay out of it.) --
but the effort of learning quote-and-response is worth it, just as the
effort of learning to speak distinctly was worth it.
When most of the contributors to a thread have mastered quote and
response, it's possible to read for meaning without being distracted
by the mechanics of communication.
This newsgroup has light traffic and tends to short threads, so there
is considerable tolerance for using whatever style you are accustomed
to. Alt.sewing is like the short stretch of one-way road near my
house: people who need to drive the other way do, and it doesn't cause
trouble because there is almost never anyone else on the road. On
some streets in my neighborhood, I walk on the left, ready to step out
of the roadway when I see someone coming. On some streets I walk on
the right, because I *can't* get out of the way, and want to give the
drivers an extra split second to avoid me. On the one-way street, I
walk right down the middle!
But even in light-traffic groups like this one, discussions that are
conducted in conversational style are much easier to follow.
Note that quote and response isn't an end in itself, but a means to
make your posts intelligible. Usenet is an asynchronous medium --
that means that some people may see your response before they see the
post you are responding to -- so we quote in order to make our posts
intelligible to people who haven't seen the rest of the thread. Even
in a synchronous medium, some of your readers will have read the
previous post yesterday, and won't remember precisely what it said.
I believe you may be accustomed to Web forums; the two I read present
the entire thread on one page every time I log in; this makes it
reasonable to write something that makes sense only when displayed
directly under the remark that it's a response to, but makes it
unreasonable to hold a prolonged conversation. Each time I log in to
Live Journal, for example, I have to skim the entire thread again to
see whether anyone has responded since the previous time; as a result,
I seldom see more than one day of comments on any topic. LJ
conversations tend to be the kind you have when passing in a hallway,
while Usenet conversations tend to be the kind you have when sitting
around with a mug of cocoa in your hand.
<digression> speaking of cocoa, chocolate is on topic in nearly every
newsgroup </digression>
Quoting is the commonest way to make a post intelligible, but you will
note that I quoted nothing at all in this post, but instead wrote an
entirely independent essay. One can also use indirect quotes or
summarize the discussion to date, or use any method that makes it
possible for people to understand your post without re-reading the
rest of the thread.
Joy Beeson
--
joy beeson at comcast dot net
http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ -- sewing
http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange
The above message is a Usenet post.
I don't recall having given anyone permission to use it on a Web site.
.
- References:
- New to group
- From: quiuxotesmom
- Re: New to group
- From: The Wanderer
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