I was in a corporate environment for a while. And carried my
'trim&interleave' habits there.
And got gently scolded for seeming to hide things!!
Corporate email users are generally incompetent at email no matter what
email conventions you use. I cannot tell you the number of times I have
emailed somebody, top-posted, explicitly said "We have three questions
blocking progress, please answer all three", asked the three questions in
clearly numbered bullet points... and got an answer back to the first and
not even an acknowledgement of the other two.
Nevertheless, I've taken up writing at the top of emails
"My replies are interleaved with your questions which are shown starting
with > symbols."
to make it obvious that they should keep reading.
It *is* possible to top-post and communicate effectively, it just takes a
LOT more work, and the sorts of people who prefer top posting simply
don't do it. Top-posting only works for shallow communication: simple
questions, simple replies, and shallow threads, two or three replies at
most. It's good for emails like:
Subject: Meet you at the pub on Friday afternoon?
See u there!!!
--- Original Message ---
Hey bro, want to catch up for drinks at the pub on Friday?
but lousy for long *discussion* threads where people are replying to
potentially dozens of separate issues within a single email.
To communicate effectively in email, you need to assume that your reader
has forgotten the context of your reply, since they may have. They are
probably dealing with dozens of other similar emails. A thread may go on
for a week, or the question may have been asked a month ago and the reply
only sent now. In long discussions, subjects may drift so that the
subject line is no longer appropriate, or it may be a generic subject
line.
In interleaved email, the quoted text acts as a refresher of previous
content. If you don't interleave, you are responsible for adding context.
Rather than:
"Sort the list first."
write something like:
"Your binary search is failing because the list is unsorted. Sort the
list first."
That's a trivial example. In practice this becomes a PITA real fast,
which is why top-posting discourages discussion in depth and encourages
short, shallow, context-free replies.
Just mentioning that there are cultures other than this one.
There are cultures that marry five year old girls to sixty year old men,
cultures that treat throwing acid in the faces of women as acceptable
behaviour, cultures that allow war heroes to die of hunger and cold
homeless in the street, and cultures that top-post. What's your point?
Of course, "Do in Rome as romans do" is universally sound advice, (with
Rome suitably parameterized), so its best to follow the netiquette of
the forum you are using.
Unless you think you can change the culture of Rome by example.
