On Mon, 4 Feb 2002, Sonja van Baardwijk-Holten wrote: > Without offending you or others Dan... it might help if the most vocal on this > list wouldn't try to burry people under a ton of e-mail if they disagree on a > subject. Especially those 10KB and over ones are really discouraging. And I'm > only half kidding here.
There's some merit to this idea. For me the size of a post is usually not much of a problem in itself -- if I get bored reading it I'll just stop and not worry about it, but if I'm interested in the topic some L3 length usually won't bother me -- but the structure. A long post that interleaves quotations from other posters with one's own comments is something I find very distracting. These are hard to avoid sometimes, but it a person has a lot to say, I think it's better to take a little more time to put a long post into a more accessible structure rather than simply chopping up somebody else's long post into bits and then responding to the bits with bits of one's own. But ... > During my education they always thought me that you need to make your point in > as short and compact a text as possible. Otherwise you risk that your audience > is either totally intimidated or bored to death at the end of a presentation. > Neither is good for a full and comprehensive discussion of topics. ... sometimes a topic is genuinely complicated, and if not everbody wants to discuss Kant and Quantum Mechanics, then one shouldn't hold a grudge against those who do enjoy such things. Generally speaking, listmembers owe it to one another to try to be clear. Nobody owes it to anybody, however, to be really interested in exactly what everybody else is. :-) Marvin Long Austin, Texas
