Editing

[Jeremy Fowler]

On 8/31/07, Monty J. Harder <mjharder at gmail.com> wrote:

> But that's not the point.  You're still sending quotes of quotes of quotes
> of the same crap for reply after reply after reply, filling up disk drives
> for no good reason.  For the poor schmucks without broadband, you're also
> taking up their bandwidth to download the redundancy.


I was making a new point - that technology is making it easier to deal with
lazy people. I wasn't saying that people shouldn't use proper etiquette.
However, I would say most people besides USENET geeks from the 90's don't
really give a hoot about proper trim and post and that its impossible to
always reign in those who neglect proper grammar and syntax.

Also, I think the argument for filling up hard drives with email message
length is a little outdated. In today's world of cheap 750GB hard drives, a
few extra KB isn't going to a kill ya. Same goes for bandwidth, outdated
argument. With all the different broadband solutions available today, if
your still on dial-up... Well, its time to pony up and get a real internet
connection. Besides, even on a 28.8 kbps dial-up connection running
3.60KB/s it would only take a couple extra seconds to download a few
extra lines
of text...

Fundamentally, it's a question of whether the writer, a single person, owes
> it to the large group of people to whom he's addressing his words, to take a
> few moments to do these things, or whether that large group of people should
> have to do the work.


You can't control what someone sends to the list, but you can control what
you read from them by using utilities, like gmail, that automatically clean
up someone's message.

I say it's the writer's job.  That means I trim excess quotage, I go over my
> own words and proof them to be sure I don't commit egregious errors of
> grammar, spelling, or usage, that will at best force my readers to do extra
> work to understand me, and at worst cause them to just nuke my posts rather
> than bothering.


Agreed, its the writer's responsibility... In a perfect world, everyone
would follow all the rules and there would be no need for topics like this.
However, in the real world I use gmail and learn to look the other way.
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