Re: A question for the group...

Dave Hinz wrote:
[...] effective communication hasn't changed in millennia. Question,
answer, in that order. Quoting with context is a natural flow of
information. Insisting that your readers scroll down to see what or who
the heck you're answering, serves no positive purpose other than,
apparently, allowing you to go into lecture mode with an audience who
understands the topic at least as well as you yourself do.

There is often a narrow border between quoting with context and
excessive repetition.

It wouldn't be so bad if those answering always took the trouble to
isolate the point that they were answering and snipped the rest of the
previous thread.

Many posts are not answers to questions but comments that could
frequently stand alone. These posts would be satisfactory if
presented with the previous point that sparked the thought presented
as a footnote for those that have no way of easily seeing a thread, or
whose memories need the reminder each time. (I'm not knocking that
sort of memory - in the main, it's not mine, but my type of memory
system has problems in other ways that are socially inconvenient in
real life, and I'd probably be glad to exchange.)

There are newsgroups/mailing-lists where the question/answer concept
is valid (though even then there is often merit in snipping the
question so as to indicate what is being seen *as* the question).
Most of the genealogical groups I haunt are not of this type, but are
liable to thread drift, and the footnote system would often be better.
.

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