On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 02:13:36PM -0000, Jeff Grigg wrote:
> (Personally, I try to edit down the quotes so that there are fewer 
> lines of quoted text than additional text.

I used to do so religiously as well, and was
the author of the humorous but serious wiki page
<http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TrimYourPosts>

Also see <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/w3c-wai-gl/2004AprJun/0883.html> 
for some string arguments about why to do this.

However, lately I do find myself top-posting on occasion. I
know managers and others at work do it all the blessed
time, and its do partly to laziness and partly to trying
to leave a pristine audit-trail in reverse-chronological
order since people often get Cc:ed only after several
messages and need the full context.

But I've started doing top-posting from time-to-time for
a different reason, and it has to do with my own personal
evolution of my communication style. I find I need to do
a better job of trying to interpret the overall message
of a post (not just the individual lines and paragraphs)
and a better job of distilling my own thoughts on the
posting as a whole.

When I try to do that, it often doesn't make sense to try and
interleave such comments in any one particular place.

I find if I interleave stuff a lot in a particular message,
its a good sign that I'm being overly argumentative and
trying to go tit-for-tat on point-by-point, and need to
step back and look at the bigger picture to communicate
more effectively.

-- 
Brad Appleton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> www.bradapp.net
  Software CM Patterns (www.scmpatterns.com)
   Effective Teamwork, Practical Integration
"And miles to go before I sleep." -- Robert Frost


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