Quoting in a threaded forum

Hopefully the ones I target will read this.

I know that correct quoting (or citing) is a formidable task which has to be learned at university. We may not be at university, we may not strive for academic honours, nevertheless we should at least try to get a few basics right. I start with the most important technical ones:

Don't full-quote! (Corollary: Try to quote as sparse as possible. See below.)
This is a Web forum, which offers all messages to go back to if one needs every letter someone has written. This is even a threaded forum, so it is not hard to find the original message cied somewhere.

Quote what is necessary to remind readers of the issue you reply to.
This helps to know what exactly you want to answer.

Try to reply in-line if several issues are answered.
This is a bit tedious since one has to add BBcode tags - in this case - but helps enormously.

And now the important structural component:

When editing the citation try to keep the original intent.
This is the hardest part. It is not easy with more formalised media, like scientific communication, but with our much more informal approach here sometimes even the sender may not be all clear about his intent. Luckily we can then discuss the point.



On a personal note: I abhor full-quotes - in e-mail, on Usenet and all the more on Web fora!

To be honest, my fingers were itching for "fully quoting" your post at the top of this one and writing underneath "I do not agree", but I do so I'll pass ;-)))

All points taken.

Look for improvement on my part.

Cem Usakligil said:

[...] "I do not agree", but I do so I'll pass [...]

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Sometimes you can be real nasty ...

Great and post.

If one feels one has to bring in a related topic. State it. Make a new paragraph, BTW, O.T., let me ......”.

Further, if there is traction on the new topic, we might want move that discussion to a separate new thread.

However, if the daughter topic is intermingled, separation may be rendered near impossible.

Asher

Dierk Haasis said:

On a personal note: I abhor full-quotes - in e-mail, on Usenet and all the more on Web fora!

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I personally top-post and full quote all everyday business email. I use inline comments when complexity demands.

Failure to include past data in an email interaction is rude and strips context from a message. The sender may not remember exactly what they said 3 days later and asking someone to go look up the email they previously sent when I could simply set my mail client defaults to provide that data to them.

Heck, I sometimes overquote and include quoted material from multiple emails.

Within this forum design, late replies to initial posts require heavy quoting or a reply on page 3 will simply seem off topic.

my $0.02,

Sean

Cem Usakligil said:

To be honest, my fingers were itching for "fully quoting" your post at the top of this one and writing underneath "I do not agree", but I do so I'll pass ;-)))

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I was gonna pull a full quote and say Cem made me do it.

Gary

@Gary: You did actually pull a full quote of my post, didn't you? ;-))))

@Dierk: LOL

Sean, I know all the reasons people use FQs and top-post - I've been through that so often and at so great lengths ... [in this case the ellipsis does not indicate irony but my loss for any intelligent simile]. I've discussed it in Usenet, I've discussed it on several mailing lists. For a few years I was very active in user-to-user support and promotion of The Bat!, the best [sic] e-mail client out here. I even wrote - with two other nice guys - a help system for it.

The gist of it is:

- top-posting is simple laziness amplified by Outlook Express' (and Outlook's and Notus Lotes') default behaviour of putting the cursor at the top
- FQ develeoped first as a side-effect of top-posting due to wrongly inserted cursors, was aggravated by laziness, and then developed into a leglese business model ('Hey, we have to have everything in all mails or we are unable to sue, counter-sue and counter-counter-sue-sue.')

Any rationalisation I ever heard/read used the exact same points, muddy arguments invoking 'business communication' - essentially nothing more than a mixture of ignorance (person never saw another way) and rationalising ones decisions. The latter is closely related to Colbert's concept of truthiness: It must be right because I believe it. Since I believe it it is truth beyond facts - which is truer than true => truthiness.

Everyone will have times trying to find a pseudo-rational explanation for something he does or believes for years. It's easier than adapting (and with it perhaps admitting one was wrong for a long time).

As for the extent of quoting for late posts, read my initial message and you will see that this case is taken care of, quote as much as is necessary to understand your reply. And don't forget to answer intermittently, so nobody has to scroll up and down to find the original points you are answering.



And again I want to chime in a few personal notes:
- we should always think of the reader when writing, it has to be as easy as possible for him
- any text should be readable when the citations are stripped [learned that from my doctoral advisor]
- on Usenet I decided long ago I won't read a message when I have to scroll a whole screen (I have a large message are on a big monitor) of quoted material; there will only be one line of new text, which is of the 'you are right/wrong' variety
- on several Web boards I am already employing the same policy, leading in effect to abandoning them; any forum is only as good as the members of it
- I'd rather read something new than something I've already ingested
- This becomes more and more a Wittgensteinian exercise (formally).*












*This is a sarcastic comment targeted at myself.

Although I have been trained by some fine moderators at the mailing lists of The Bat!, I temporarily forgot the excellent principles you've set forth, in the excitement I felt upon discovering OPF*.

Also, learning the mechanics of writing in the OPF windows has been a bit daunting for me. But that's no excuse.

To Dierk: As I posted earlier in this thread, look for improvement on what you see here from me.

I did know better, and I was lazy.

*Edited to make clear grammatically that I'm the one who's excited to be here.
I'm still not pleased with my sentence structure, but it will have to do. I'm a bit scared of getting timed-out.

Mary, why you had "Timeouts" I don't know, just use the advanced tab belore the box. I have increased all the times now even further. Asher

Yeah, and coloured/fancy fonts other html stuff ain't required either...

Often the quoted text is small, wasted real estate around it, etc. Plain text works fine.

Best wishes,

Ray

I'm learning.

FWIW, this is the first website I've ever written in.

Four years with The Bat! Discussion Groups (my peerless e-mail program's mailing lists) got me spoiled, with TB!'s easy in-line plain-text quoting templates.

Dierk was right to chide me--he was one of my teachers. Although, gentleman that he is, he didn't mention my name as among those he was targeting.

Dierk Haasis said:

Try to reply in-line if several issues are answered.

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What I've noticed lacking in all forum software like this one is an "insert quote" shortcut. I never find any use for the quote features as implemented in the editors; they are backwards. There is already a leading "quote" and trailing "/quote" when you make a quoted reply. If you are not using a quoted reply, then there is nothing to wrap the quotes around. The only need, then, is to *break* the quoted material; not to quote anything that is already in the editor. What would be nice is something that places a "/quote", 3 newlines, and then a "quote" where the cursor is, with the resulting cursor left in the middle blank line. You can't even easily re-arrange what the software inserts with drag-and-drop, because highlighting will always treat series of brackets as a single unit, so you can not possibly highlight properly without first inserting spaces.

John Sheehy said:

What I've noticed lacking in all forum software like this one is an "insert quote" shortcut.

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I agree.

I never find any use for the quote features as implemented in the editors; they are backwards.

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Gosh I never even knew that feature was there. I've always done it manually. Thanks!

The only need, then, is to *break* the quoted material; not to quote anything that is already in the editor.

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Like I'm doing now, you mean?

What would be nice is something that places a "/quote", 3 newlines, and then a "quote" where the cursor is, with the resulting cursor left in the middle blank line.

Click to expand...

Yes that would be a great improvement, but I'm so tickled with finding the Quote button, thanks to you, that I'm in no mood to quibble. ;-)

Thanks again!

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net

Amen!

My rather clumsy work-around is:

1) To hit the Quote button for a reply I wish to quote from.

2) Then delete the passages not relevant to my comment.

3) If I am commenting on several but not all passages in the quote, highlight and use CTRL-X on the sentences I'm about to comment on.

4) Hit the "Quote" button on the toolbar, which comes up with ithe cursor positioned between quote and end-quote.

5) Use CTRL-V to copy the selected text I wish to quote and reply to.

6) Write my comment.

7) Continue this way for the rest of the passages.

8) Finally, erase the sig and the end-quote HTML tag from the end of the full quote with which I started.

Thus I end up with in-line conversation.

Something that is fully automated for me in the templates of my e-mail client The Bat!

And how I *do* miss that, when I'm at OPF!

Mary
< in the amen corner >

John Sheehy said:

What I've noticed lacking in all forum software like this one is an "insert quote" shortcut.

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I don't know how I typed that. I meant "break quote".

I knew what you meant. Sometimes I will put the "[quote /quote]" into the message from the toolbar and then manually erase the "quote" part of it, to insert a break quote (end quote). Or, I'll do the reverse to keep just the quote part. It takes 7 keystrokes to backspace over "(quote)" and 8 keystrokes to backspace over "(/quote)"--I counted, because I kept over-running them trying to backspace over them "by eye."
<very big grin >

Mary