Having ventured this week into adding my cent's worth in an online discussion forum, the sole direct (off-list) response I got was a curtly worded email telling me that, if I was going to top-post, then at least delete the quoted gubbins underneath. It was then that I remembered why I don't usually bother contributing to discussion forums.
I know so few people who don't top-post in their emails that, after much racking of my brain, I am still counting them on the fingers of one hand. Popular new email tools such as GMail just go for the quoted text route.
If I were paranoid, I'd think John Gruber's post somehow connected other than by the subject matter: its timing was perfect.
The fundamental source of poor email style is the practice of quoting the entire message you’re replying to. If that’s what you do, then it doesn’t matter whether you put your response at the top or bottom. In fact, if you’re going to quote the entire message, top-posting probably is better. But both are poor form.
Writing an email is like writing an article. Only quote the relevant parts, interspersing your new remarks between the quoted passages. Don’t quote anything at all from the original message if you don’t have to.
I'll leave to one side the odd suggestion that writing an article is like quoting relevant parts and interspersing your new remarks (that's more like annotation — annotation-for-friends?), and merely note that this bothers John so much he's even written some script for Apple Mail:
For the email accounts that I want to read on my iPhone, I need IMAP, so I’m switching those accounts to Apple Mail. I’ve been dreading this for years. My first must-fix annoyance is that Mail’s Reply feature is hard-wired to encourage top-posting, an uncouth and illiterate practice.
Lucky he doesn't use GMail, then! Wikipedia: 'The default quote format and cursor placement of many popular e-mail applications, such as Microsoft Outlook and Gmail, encourages top-posting. Microsoft has had a significant influence on top-posting by the ubiquity of its software; its e-mail and newsreader software places the cursor at the top by default, and in several cases makes it difficult not to top-post'.
What strikes me as bizarre is the idea knocking around (in the email to me, in John Gruber's On Top post) that somehow the moral, literate and intelligent high-ground belongs to the anti-top-posting guys ('Does it take more time to edit the portions of quoted text included in your reply? Yes. So does spell-checking and proofreading. It also takes time to shower and brush your teeth each day'). It doesn't. I find annotated email much harder to read than top-posted email. I imagine this is because it's what I'm used to working with — and guess the same applies to those few people I know who like and use John Gruber's approach to email. (Hunting the annotations is, to me, a tedious and fragmentary experience. If it's supposed to create the illusion of conversation … well, it falls on my ears like snatched, broken remarks and nothing like a conversation.)
I have more sympathy with John's view when he says, 'the idea that each new reply in a thread ought to contain the entirety of each previous message in the thread is … unnecessary' (I've cut out 'silly, wasteful, distracting') — but, really, so what? Far and away most of the people I know who still use email ignore the quoted stuff (and, of course, GMail has the clickable '- Show quoted text -' line in incoming emails that are part of a thread, so by default quoted text is hidden), very occasionally stepping into it when they want to fish out some new part of the conversation.
All in all, I'd far rather spend my time thinking carefully what I want to say in reply to someone and then write that in as good English as I can. In any event, there are surely more important things to be fussing about — such as what you're actually contributing via email (be it top-posted, interlaced, whatever), not to mention how you make people feel welcome on forum discussion lists. Michael Sippey:
Jon Gruber on the reason 99% of email users will not live up to the Official Daring Fireball expectations for appropriate use of electronic mail: "The fundamental source of poor email style is the practice of quoting the entire message you’re replying to." I used to care about things like this. Then I stopped caring...right around the time I stopped caring about whether people sent me email in plain text. Life's been a lot simpler ever since.
Oh, and Drew Thaler commented in his del.icio.us bookmark of John Gruber's On Top post item, 'Top-posting was bad form on Usenet in 1991, but it's standard practice in e-mail in 2007'.
Thinking about all this, I can see there are issues with top-posting and discussion mailing-lists. The Wikipedia article does a good job of outlining these:
Top-posting is viewed as seriously destructive to mailing-list digests, where multiple levels of top-posting are difficult to skip. The worst case would be top-posting while including an entire digest as the original message. Some believe that "top-posting" is appropriate for interpersonal e-mail, but inline posting should always be applied to threaded discussions such as newsgroups. Objections to top-posting on newsgroups, as a rule, seem to come from persons who first went online in the earlier days of Usenet, and in communities that date to Usenet's early days. … Newer online participants, especially those with limited experience of Usenet, tend to be less sensitive to arguments about posting style. … As news and mail readers have become more capable, and as propagation times have grown shorter, newer users may find top-posting more efficient.
Discussion groups might consider having a short summary of preferred usage to help educate their users. That might then help people feel welcomed, too.
There are a number of things here to build in to a good ICT course for students.
