Dear ASA friends,
This list is an extremely interesting place for discussion of questions
relating to Christianity / science issues. I greatly enjoy reading your
messages, particularly the many careful considerations - even the long
ones!
Yet, sometimes it is becoming rather time-consuming and tedious to wade
through all these many contributions. I am forced to unsubscribe when I
am away for a week or more. But the situation could be markedly improved
if all contributors would respect a few very simple rules for reducing
substantially the text volume transmitted.
May I make some suggestions (with my apologies to all those of you for
whom all this is already obvious)?
1. Please use plain text only!
With MIME messages, at least those of us who receive the messages as
plain text (for various reasons) get about 3 times the amount of text,
first the message proper, followed by the same thing once more, enriched
with all manner of formating gibberish. Maybe there are other fancy
formats resulting in similar overheads.
2. Please delete from your message all unused text before you mail it!
When you use the "Reply" button to answer a particular incoming mail,
the content of the incoming e-mail is automatically appended to what you
write ("Original message:..."). After this has occurred a few times in a
dialog, the final receiver gets a message perhaps 10 or 20 times as long
as needed, containing the same texts repeatedly, growing like an
avalanche! Of course, often some reminder of what your correspondent
wrote is required for comprehension of your answer, and respondents
often insert their responses at various places of the text received. But
even here, people often fail to snip out unneeded passages.
3. Please write your contribution offline!
This makes it much easier to formulate carefully, improving the
information-to-noise quotient appreciably. I found it most convenient to
hit the "Reply" button in the mail window, transfer the contents to the
text software, insert my replies, edit out what's superfluous, and
recopy the result into an empty mail form of the mail software.
4. Please use a writing window width of around 70 characters!
Many short lines (or lines cut in the reading window because they are
too long) make it more difficult to keep the overall view of a lengthy
context.
Thank you for your consideration!
Peter
-- Dr Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland <pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution "..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Feb 28 2002 - 00:57:33 EST