Top-posting Considered Harmful
I'm starting to fear that Jeopardy-style quoting is so prevalent now that many people just stop reading as soon as they see their own name in an email.
For example, imagine an email reply that was shaped like exactly like this blog post, with a preamble paragraph like this before I got into actually responding to what you said, which I shall begin to do by pulling a quote from your original message.
On Tuesday, Nov 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM, You wrote:
>
> Hey jmac. Did you know that I like cheese?
>
> It's so delicious. I can't eat enough of it. I wish I had some.
> :(
And here's my response to your dilemma, perhaps telling you where you can find some cheese right around the corner, but you won't read this far because you see the "On Tuesday..." line with all the quoting underneath, and figure that everything afterwards is just a copy of the mail thread so far. But you'd be wrong. No cheese for you.
This has started to cause some real problems, for me, I think. It's annoying but there's little I can do, other than never begin with a preamble if I'm going to do any quote-interleaving. (Leading with a quote never seems to confuse anyone.)
For example, imagine an email reply that was shaped like exactly like this blog post, with a preamble paragraph like this before I got into actually responding to what you said, which I shall begin to do by pulling a quote from your original message.
On Tuesday, Nov 14, 2006 at 12:01 PM, You wrote:
>
> Hey jmac. Did you know that I like cheese?
>
> It's so delicious. I can't eat enough of it. I wish I had some.
> :(
And here's my response to your dilemma, perhaps telling you where you can find some cheese right around the corner, but you won't read this far because you see the "On Tuesday..." line with all the quoting underneath, and figure that everything afterwards is just a copy of the mail thread so far. But you'd be wrong. No cheese for you.
This has started to cause some real problems, for me, I think. It's annoying but there's little I can do, other than never begin with a preamble if I'm going to do any quote-interleaving. (Leading with a quote never seems to confuse anyone.)