Re: Cropped tails are beautiful...

[mp newsroom@xxxxxxxx]

Before email, I used to excahnge letters with several people
and one of the problems in responses (especially when letters are
responded to after weeks etc) is to remember both what one wrote
to the other the last time, and what is being responded to etc.

With overnight email, it is too easy to include the previous
"tails" but email provides us with a unique opportunity to
change our way of "conversing" in print and make exchanges
far more understandable and meaningfu;.

(NOTE: THE FOLLOWING IS NOT A TAIL...)

At 02:31 AM 6/04/00 -0400, JUDITH DAVIDSON wrote:
>
>Without the "tails," I find, it is often impossible to
>figure out what messages answer what questions.

I agree

>
>Can anyone think of a solution that might satisfy both of
>us?

My solution, as you see from this, is to USE the previous message by
inserting my comments within, and deleting unneeded parts of the original
message
but retaining enough so people can see the connections.

This takes a little more time, but it seems to me is -- or ought to be --
part of the courtesy and "netiquette" for email.

regards
-pjd


PS

I just read, and concur with Peter Evans who wrote:

>The solution is staggeringly simple. In one way or another, you summarize
>the question or problem to which you're responding, quoting only as
>necessary. Self-evidently (to me, at least), regurgitation of entire
>messages, complete with signatures (phone numbers, quotations and the rest
>of it) shows a lack even of a token interest in raising the S/N ratio.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

regards again
-pjd

(Note that this PS was added by leaving my original "send" message
on the queue until I had read all the current inbasket -- even
though I wrote the first part of the reply as soon as I read
Judith Davidson's letter - another neat advantage of email)

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