Re: Terseness

[jgv@swl.msd.ray.com (John Volan)]

dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar) writes:

>John (Volan), I trust you use a news reader that follows threads, if not
>it is VERY hard to follow and respond to news coherently. 

[snip]

>So, John, just for interest, do you follow threads, or do you read messages
>sequentially (I bet the latter!)

Sorry, you lost that bet! ;-) Yes, my newsreader does follow threads
[*um, see footnote below].  This does help by at least placing a post
in the context of its thread, but sometimes this isn't enough context
to avoid confusion.  *Within* a given thread, I find that posts do not
necessarily appear in the order they were sent (presumably because of
geographical differences in transmission lag).  I suppose a smart
newsreader could sort posts by sending-order, as well as by thread,
but I don't think this would solve every problem.  What if you see a
response on Tuesday, read it (thus "eliminating" it from the thread),
and then finally get the original post on Thursday?

Even if posts do arrive in sending-order, what if there's a
significant time gap?  Let's say Mr. Alpha posts something on Tuesday.
Ms. Beta reads it on Wednesday, thinks up an interesting response on
Thursday, mulls on it overnight, and posts it on Friday.  By the time
poor Mr. Gamma sees Ms. Beta's response on Monday, his memory of Mr.
Alpha's original post has gotten a little foggy.  In the meanwhile,
the thread has spawned a lively discussion between Messrs. Delta,
Epsilon, and Zeta, who each fired off several posts on Wednesday,
Thursday, and Friday.  By the time poor Mr. Gamma wades through these
to get to Ms. Beta's post, the context of Mr. Alpha's original post
may have completely dissipated, unless Ms. Beta has been kind enough
to quote from it.  When Ms. Eta finally logs into the newsgroup a week
or so later (after her newsreader has already flushed Mr. Alpha's
post) she may see several simultaneous, intertwined discussions all
under the same subject (Mr. Theta and Ms. Iota having thrown in some
tangential issues), and there may be no clue as to what anybody is
talking about, other than what can be gleaned from quotes.

>It is true that if you follow messages blindly
>in sequence, then you might even get to like these horrible quotes.
                                                    ^^^^^^^^

Well, I'm certainly not an advocate of "horrible" quotes that go to
tremendous extremes.  I believe it's incumbent on a responder to be
judicious and selective in how much of the original to quote, and how
best to break up a long quote to respond to it point for point.
Anyone who just quotes a long post in its entirety without doing a
little editing is simply being lazy, in my book.  And if the quoted
post *itself* contains a huge quote ... well, that kind of cascading
is an abuse, pure and simple.  But just because quoting can be abused
doesn't necessarily mean that *all* quoting is absolutely bad, IMHO.
Like anything, it has to be approached thoughtfully.

>In particular,
>the example message you just gave indeed had no context, because you
>started a brand new thread. 

Er, if you recall, the original subject line used to be "Robert
Dewar's horrible posts".  I refuse to promote the rather bizarre
agenda of the person who started *that* thread, even to the extent of
having my posts carry such a subject line (or even by referring to it
with a "[was: ... ]" annotation).  I wanted my comments to be viewed
in a much milder and more constructive light, so I thought it wise to
start a whole new thread.

				-- John Volan

[*] P.S. In the above discussion, I'm assuming that the term "thread"
is synonymous with "subject", but maybe I'm still naive about Internet
lingo.  Are there newsreaders smart enough to "follow the references,"
thereby distinguishing separate "threads" even within the same
"subject"?  (In which case, why don't we make that bet best two out of
three?  ;-)

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
--  Me : Person := (Name                => "John Volan",
--                  Company             => "Raytheon Missile Systems Division",
--                  E_Mail_Address      => "jgv@swl.msd.ray.com",
--                  Affiliation         => "Enthusiastic member of Team Ada!",
--                  Humorous_Disclaimer => "These opinions are undefined " &
--                                         "by my employer and therefore " &
--                                         "any use of them would be "     &
--                                         "totally erroneous.");
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------