Is the following reasonable?
When broadcasting messages, please attach your name. It's much more
friendly than a blank spot where one expects the signature, and it allows us
readers to connect you to previous things you've written. It helps to know
names to connect the arguements in a debate--not to dismiss a message as
being from "John Doe", but to allow us to mentally connect recent
elaborations and corrections with "John Doe"'s previous thoughts.
We can do nothing about the facelessness of Inter-Network Christian
Fellowship (which can potentially lead to misunderstandings, as we miss the
non-verbal cues that are part of ordinary communication). But we can do
something about namelessness.
I'd encourage everyone (myself included) to follow up an ancient suggestion
and disseminate brief bios as well.
Also, prehaps it would be good to broadcast a list of Internet abbreviations
(IMO, ROFL, etc), meta-punctuation ;-) , and Nettiquete pointers. (For the
benefit of the newbies, and forgetful oldbies). Does anyone have such an
e-mail that they could share?
In light of the above,
Ann O. Nymous <-- that would be a name (if it were a
name)
;-^) <-- that would mean 'tongue-in-cheek'