Beginner's Guide To Posting

[Anonymous Email]

Posting for beginners:

Don't be overly ambitious. Quoting is hard? Nesting is hard? Keep it simple.

Write one email per topic. Set an appropriate subject line. That means:

Shiny New Subject Line (was: Previous Subject Line)

In your email, don't go back and forth quote, reply, quote, reply,
quote reply. That's too ambitious. If you do that, people will reply
to each part, possibly a couple times per part. It will get long and
hard to deal with.

Quote one paragraph (a couple if they are short and go together)
saying one thing. Only quote one person. No nested quotes.

You must mark the quote as a quote. If it looks identical to your own
text, that's really bad.

However, even if you do it wrong your post will still be readable
because of the simple organization. If you write a more complicated
type of post with nesting and multiple sections, quoting pretty must
has to be perfect. But with this simple posting style, as long as you
do something to quote it'll probably work out OK enough.

The main point of formatting rules is they are necessary for
organizing more complicated discussions. If you keep things simple,
formatting mistakes are less important.

Write your reply below the quote. Your entire post will be in one
section, all together.

Make your reply from one to five paragraphs. No more. If you have more
to say that you can't fit, split it up as separate emails for each
point you want to make.

Keep your paragraphs short. See this email? See what the paragraphs
look like? That's good. That's a goal to aim for. It's OK if you don't
succeed. If your paragraphs are three times longer than this example,
maybe you're doing OK still. If they are ten times longer, you can
pretty much assume no one is going to understand your point.

With this approach per posting, it will be clear what you are replying
to. If you quote an entire email and reply at the bottom (or worse,
top) then it's hard to tell specifically what text you're trying to
answer.

This may take some getting used to. Most people don't have a clear
idea in their mind of what text they are replying to when they write
replies. But that's a good skill to learn!

One third of your posts should be questions. When you ask a question
to understand what someone is saying better or get something
clarified, don't also argue a bunch of stuff. Just explain the
question and ask it.