Re: Where does the Republican Party stand on the 1st Amendment?

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:58:37 EDT, "Richard M. Smith" said:
I went back and re-read what you typed, and realized that there's a semantic
gap here.  (Are you wondering what I'm talking about yet? Right, you are,
because you haven't seen the referent yet.  That's the point here. Keep
reading...)

Top-posting is *not* about "the most important stuff comes first" - if you
notice, unlike the previous paragraph, a newspaper story starts off with an
introductory paragraph to set the context, and then the *following* paragraphs
refer back to it.  Newspaper articles are "bottom posted" - otherwise, like the
previous paragraph above, you haven't seen what the reporter is referring to
yet.

Top-posting is the tendency of some mail client software to force or encourage
people to add the text of their replies *above* the text being replied to.
In this case, an argument can be made that if you're following "the most
important stuff comes first" rule, top-posting your reply in an e-mail
is *still* the wrong thing to do, because the *most* important thing is
making sure your reader has a clear grasp as to what you are replying to,
so the reader has the context of your reply.  Otherwise, the reader is left
dangling and wondering, much as you probably were in the first paragraph
of this reply...

Most of your other examples (lists of postings on blogs, bank statements,
and so on) are how *different items* are presented.  In those cases, there's
two points *not* true for multi-paragraph emails:

1) You're looking at one-line summaries.
2) If items *are* linked, there's usually a Re: or "More about", and the
rest of the one line consists of enough text referring back to the original
that the reader can fill in the context.

If you've ever been reading a blog, and seen something top-posted that
made *no* sense and left you saying "WTF?" until you read several items
lower, you've experienced exactly *why* top-posting is a bad idea in
most e-mails, unless your reply consists of <AOL> me too </AOL> or something
equally lengthy.  

> What's wrong with top posting?  The most important stuff comes first and
> there is nothing to scroll through to get to it.  Newspaper articles use the
> same technique.

Exactly.  The *most important* thing in this entire reply is the second sentence
in the part quoted above, because that's what the whole reply is *about*.
So it should have appeared up front.

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