James Watt's posting re 'Do Not Quote the Entire Message in Your Reply' was welcome to me. But I started thinking that the annoyance level of this depends on the form in which people receive messages. Something else for lingusitic/communication folks to analyze, perhaps. Watt and I are digest readers, and it is a PITA to plow through a series of quoted full-length replies. On the other hand, if folks are getting one message at a time, it is much less annoying, and perhaps even useful to quote full messages. You read the reply and enough of the quoted message to get context. So the medium affects the usefulness of the message;-) I wonder how many readers of this list are digest readers or one-at-a-time readers. Barry PS: It is also an undisputed PITA to plow thru HTML after plain ASCII, which too many folks do also: turn that HTML off, svp. ___________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman@chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 ___________________________________________________________________