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Quoting Usenet Articles in Follow-ups
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Contents
The Aim Of This Document
What Is Quoting?
Why Should I Quote?
How Do I Quote?
Suggestions: How To Form Your Reply
Why Bother Following This Style?
Credits
Improvements
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The Aim of this Document
This document constitutes a suggested style for Usenet articles that quote
the articles of others. It does not pretend to deal with all aspects of
posting on Usenet (see the news.announce.newusers newsgroup and sections
3.1.1 and 3.1.3 of the Netiquette Guidelines in RFC1855 for more general
help), but in the experience of those of us who have had a hand in the
formation of this document, the quoting of previous postings is an issue
that many people have problems with, especially in light of recent software
that is less than helpful to the uninformed user.
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What Is Quoting?
Quoting is placing the relevant text of the news article you are replying to
in your own article. Lines of quoted text should be marked at the beginning
with a special character to indicated that they are quoted rather than
original text. The symbol most often used for marking in this manner is the
"greater-than" symbol (>).
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Why Should I Quote?
Quoting the text of the articles you are responding to helps the reader
follow the thread that your posting becomes a part of. The reader does not
need to look back at the previous articles to understand the context that
makes yours meaningful.
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How Do I Quote?
Most newsreaders automatically quote in your reply the article you are
following-up (answering). Otherwise, copy the message you are replying to,
and paste the text into your reply, indicating in some way that the text is
quoted.
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Suggestions: How to Form Your Reply
Always place your text under the text of the articles you are quoting.
If your newsreader places the cursor above the quoted material, move it to
the end of the message before you start writing your reply. (Some
newsreaders have an option to have the cursor initially placed at the end of
the quoted text. RTFM.)
Quote no more text than necessary.
Only leave the text from the previous message that is necessary to give your
article its intended meaning. A useful aim, though not always practical, is
that less than half of your total message should be quoted text. If you
delete text from the previous article, indicate that you have done so. A
common way of doing this is by inserting [snip] or [...] on a line by
itself, in place of the deleted text.
Make use of white space.
A blank line takes up only one or two bytes. Leave a blank line between the
quoted text and your reply. Doing so makes your posting easier to read.
Do not quote the signatures of previous posters.
You should quote the .sig of a previous poster only when it is specifically
the .sig that you are responding to (see immediately below). If a previous
poster has quoted someone else's .sig, you can remove it, unless doing so
changes the context of the thread.
Indicate whom you are quoting.
Most newsreading software automatically places an attribution of the quoted
text at the top of the reply. Leave it there. It is good manners, not to
mention rather convenient at times, to be able to match poster with posted
text. If your newsreader does not place an attribution in your reply, then
add a line with at least the name of the person you are quoting.
Do not quote the headers of previous posters.
You should quote the headers of previous posters only when it is
specifically the headers that you are responding to. If a previous poster
has quoted someone else's headers, you can remove them, unless doing so
changes the context of the thread.
Do not change quoted text.
Misrepresenting the opinions of others is dishonest. The line lengths of a
quoted article can be changed with impunity, but nothing else. (If the
profanity of others offends you to the extent that you deem it inappropriate
even as quoted text in your reply, either paraphrase the previous article,
or forget about replying.)
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Why Bother Following this Style?
You save bandwidth.
Your message is easier to read and understand in its context.
The reader can more readily see what you say, the way you say it merging
more into the background.
More people will read what you have to say (at least to begin with).
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Credits
This document is based on a translation of a Norwegian document. There have,
however, been numerous changes to the content, based on the comments and
suggestions of some of the friendly people of alt.usage.english. For the
names of the people who have been involved (except those who post X
no-archive), see the thread Usenet Quoting Style that I started, inviting
discussion of the original document.
A copy of this document is also kept on the alt.usage.english website.
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Improvements
If you have any suggestions for improvements to this document, please do not
hesitate to send them to me. See here for details of how.
Happy Posting!
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Copyright 1999, 2003 © Simon R. Hughes
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How do I quote correctly in Usenet? - Quoting and Answering
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2. Quoting and Answering
2.1 How much should I quote?
It is not necessary to quote the entire text of the person you respond to. A
quoting should always and first of all clarify the context, enabling the
reader to understand the flow of the thread. A quoting is not ment to
re-post the previous article.
In general, it is completely sufficient to only leave that part of the
message to which one refers. People reading the thread either know the
context of the discussion or are able to find the context by using the
References to read the entire thread. In order to fully understand the
message it is quite often necessary to read the previous articles anyway,
since one message leads to another and sometimes can only be understood when
read in context.
By quoting only the necessary parts, the reading-flow is simplified a lot,
especially with respect to long articles. Big quotations often make it more
difficult to find the actual new text. It is not uncommon that people do not
even read the entire article - who wants to read the entire text *again* in
search of something new?
On the other hand, the quotation should not be so short that it is unclear
to what the author is referring to, or so that it may even appear in a
totally different light.
2.2 What should not be quoted?
Text to which you are not responding should be deleted. This way you make it
easier for others to read your response without having to reread old text.
Also, you save tons of bandwidth on thousands of servers.
In general, signatures have nothing to do with the context of the article,
and usually you are not going to refer to the poster's signature. Therefore,
signatures should always be deleted. A good newsreader offers the
possibility to do this automatically - of course only provided the signature
was separated from the text with the correct delimiter (two dashes and a
space on a single line).
2.3 Why should I place my response below the quoted text?
Usually, the reading-flow is from left to right and from top to bottom, and
people expect a chronological sequence similar to this. Especially people
who are reading a lot of articles (and who therefore would qualify as the
ideal person to answer your question) appreciate it if they can read at
first the text to which you are referring. The quoted text is some kind of
help to remember the topic, which of course will not work, if you place the
quoted text below your response.
Furthermore, that's the standard. This may sound as a weak argument, but
since people are not used to reading the other way around, they have no idea
what you are referring to and have to go back and forth between the
referenced articles, have to jump between different articles and so on. In
short - reading the article becomes more and more difficult - for people who
read many articles it is reason enough to skip the entire article, if the
context is not obvious.
And besides: doesn't it look stupid to first get the answer and then see the
question? (Aside from Jeopardy, of course.)
Furthermore, you (yes: You) save a lot of time using this way of quoting:
You do not need to repeat what the person you refer to wrote, in order to
show the context. You just place your comment after the text you wish to
comment upon, and everybody immediately knows what you refer to. Also, you
realize which text you are *not* responding to and can delete these parts.
So: using this technique you save time, your readers don't have to waste
time, you save bandwidth and disk-space. Isn't it great what you can achieve
by such simple means?
2.4 But my newsreader places the cursor above the quoted text.
Yes, of course. The cursor is placed at the beginning so you can edit the
text from top to bottom and delete the parts you are not referring to. And
of course it is easier for you to place your response where it belongs - the
newsreader has no way of knowing this.
2.5 Why should I not attach the entire original article in the end?
Most people read an article from top to bottom (don't you?). Quite
frequently, the end of an article does not fit into the screen or the
window. If you attach the entire original article at the end, many people
have no way of knowing whether or not you wrote something underneath. So
they have to scroll down all the way to the end of the article, just to find
that there is nothing of interest. This is very tiring, especially for
people who are are reading lots of newsgroups each day. Just think: even
reading briefly through the article takes quite some time, and not only one,
but all articles count.
Furthermore, attaching the entire original article at the end goes against
the idea that you should quote only what you are referring to. Also, it is
unnecessary to post one and the same article again and again and again (in
every response to your response and so on). Bandwidth and disk-space issues
are bound to occur in no time.
2.6 A blank row between the quoted text and my response? Why?
Adding a blank line between the quoted and your text helps to differentiate
between the two. Nobody likes to look for the answer in some text they
already know. Not every newsreader or every terminal is able to display
quoted text in a different font or color, or even if these possibilities
exist, it is easier on the eyes if there is some blank space between the
two.
2.7 How do I mark text I left out?
Text you left out when quoting should always be marked with "[...]" or
"(...)", while the first is much more common. Another possibility that has
become more and more common is to use "<snip>".
Many people tend to simply cut out the lines to which they are not referring
to without marking this change. This is usually not ment to be impolite, but
rather to save the author some time. Everybody can get the entire original
text by following the referenced articles.
But if you leave out parts of a sentence, you definitely should mark this as
described above.
2.8 May I reformat the quoted text?
Yes. But be warned - there are some people who consider the reformatting of
quoted text as impolite. As long as the text is only re*formatted* and the
content of the the text is not changed, these provocation should not be paid
any attention. After all, you can always view the original formatting by
following the referenced articles. In books or magazines you wouldn't quote
the format 1:1 either.
It is however important to pay attention to keep the quotation-mark on the
left side when reformatting the original text.
2.9 What about correcting spelling errors?
In general: Don't. Even if you have good intentions, many people feel
insulted when you "correct" their text. Sometimes the misspelling may even
have been intentional, for example if somebody spells "broken" as "borken".
And, to be precise, this behavior would not qualify as "quoting" anymore.
2.10 What's up with those "broken" special character?
Some newsreader are not able to display special characters such as umlauts
(ä, ö, ü) or quoted-printable encoded characters (for example =E4).
Sometimes an article does even contain "broken" characters (for example "v"
for "ö", or "á" for "ß"). In these cases, however, one *should* replace the
"broken" special characters with the correct ones - the readers will be
thankful.
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Last ref:
Quoting Style
Richard Kettlewell
What's this about, then?
This document is about quoting style on USENET. It suggests a number of
things that writers can choose to do in order to improve the readability of
articles, and a number of things that they should avoid.
Although the primary focus regards news postings, the advice is good for
email too: readability is just as important in email as in news.
Summary
When following up an article on USENET, following the guidelines below
should lead to more readable articles than otherwise:
Interleave new text with quoted text whenever appropriate
Delete irrelevant quoted text
Preserve attributions appropriately
Introduction
Many postings to USENET are "followups" of some existing article. People
often include some or all of the text from the article they are replying to
in order to provide context to the reader. There are a variety of styles in
which one can do this - for example one could put new text before or after
quoted text, or interleaved with it.
Some of those styles are better than others. This document aims to describe
what the best styles are, and to explain why they are felt to be best.
Posters should use these best styles and avoid inferior ones.
It's a fundamental assumption of this document that the reader's time is
very much more important than the writer's: in other words, if the writer
can spend a few extra seconds to save a small amount of effort on the part
of the reader, then that is time well spent. The justification for this
assumption is that there are many readers but (for each post) only one
writer, so any saving on the part of the reader is multiplied up.
Interleave New Text with Quoted Text
When posting a followup, there are (at least) three ways to manage the mix
of new and quoted text:
No quoted text at all
Top posting
Interleaved text
No quoted text
The first way is simply to omit the article being replied to entirely and
just post new text; the primary problem with this is that the reader may
have no idea what is actually being replied to and has to either guess from
the reply, or go back and look. Either are more time consuming than having
the relevant text immediately available on screen.
Example:
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
I agree.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
Can you tell what Igor agrees with from this? The reader must manually check
the previous article to see what on earth Igor is talking about. This may
not take long, but the reader shouldn't have to do it, it may not actually
be possible for some readers; sometimes articles arrive out of order or even
not at all.
It's true that there is typically a "Subject:" field purporting to provide
some information about the thread in which the article appears, but this is
insufficient for two reasons. Firstly threads drift across many topics
sometimes without any change to the "Subject:" field, and secondly it is
generally only a line or so and generally contains relatively little useful
information about what is being discussed even when it is accurate.
Summary: all articles should include at least some of the text from the
article they are responding to, so that the reader can more rapidly
understand what the new article means.
This raises the question, of course, of how to arrange the quoted text and
the new text.
Top posting
"Top posting" refers to the practice of putting new text right at the top of
the article, followed by some or all of the original article. Often a
signature is placed between the new and quoted text. The result might look
like this:
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
I agree.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
Dracula said:
All vampire bats should be given free sheep to feed on.
Firstly, using this method with a signature between new and quoted text is a
dead loss; some newsreaders snip off signatures in displayed articles,
resulting in the reader seeing only the new text - so this style of top
posting will (for some readers) decay to the no quoted text case.
Ignoring that case, this approach is still suboptimal. The reader presumably
reads from top to bottom; so they will see the response first, and then see
what it is a response to. This is the reverse order to normal conversation
and writing - you don't answer someone's question before they ask it!
It's even worse if there are several things to respond to:
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
I agree.
I disagree.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
Dracula said:
All vampire bats should be given free sheep to feed on.
Domestic servants get too much holiday.
You have to read the whole article before you can figure out what Igor is
agreeing or disagreeing with. It'd be even worse if he was writing
multi-line responses to multi-line assertions from Dracula - there'd be more
information to keep in your head as you match up each response with the text
it is a response to. And just try doing it if there are a dozen or so
different points to keep track of...
Of course an alternative would be to make each bit of the response refer to
appropriate original text, for example:
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
I agree about the sheep, but I disagree about the domestic servants.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
Dracula said:
All vampire bats should be given free sheep to feed on.
Domestic servants get too much holiday.
This is better, but for an even slightly more complex conversation the
reader would still have to look back and forth in the article to see exactly
what the poster was responding to.
Summary: top posting violates the natural way in which people read postings,
and makes it unclear what the posting actually means.
Fortunately, there is a better way.
Interleaved text
By interleaved text, I mean the practice of inserting the response to each
part of the original article just after the quoted text appropriate to that
response. For example:
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
Dracula said:
All vampire bats should be given free sheep to feed on.
I agree.
Domestic servants get too much holiday.
I disagree.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
The interleaving of the text makes it immediately clear what Igor is
agreeing with or disagreeing with; and you can understand the first half of
the article just by reading the first half, rather than having to read the
whole thing before it can make sense.
This approach may be a bit more work for the writer (though personally I
always felt it came pretty naturally); they have to insert blank space in
the appropriate places as well as writing new text. But as argued above,
this is worthwhile if it saves even a little effort for the reader; and in
fact this approach also makes it easier for the writer to be sure that they
have responded to everything they meant to - anything they forgot to respond
to will stand out as a chunk of quoted text with no response after it.
Summary: the best way to arrange the quoted and new text is to insert the
new text on new lines within the quoted text, so that it always immediately
follows the relevant portion of the quoted text.
It's worth mentioning one other point here. Sometimes interleaving replies
with existing text too enthusiastically can result in a failure to see the
wood for the trees: in some cases rather than (for example) dividing a
paragraph up into three bits and replying to each separately, it is more
sensible to reply to the paragraph as an integrated whole. Which style is
more appropriate is a matter that can only be judged on case-by-case basis.
Delete Irrelevant Quoted Text
Whichever way you quote, it's worth putting in a little effort to delete any
quoted text that you're not going to respond to. If the writer does this
then the reader doesn't have to guess which bit of text they are responding
to and which bits are irrelevant, but can see it immediately.
There is another advantage in that it makes posts shorter, and thus quicker
to read. Arguments about network bandwidth are somewhat relevant, since some
readers still pay by the byte; but I consider human time - "eyeball
bandwidth" - much more important. It's annoying paging through hundreds of
lines of quoted text to discover that the poster has written a single line
of agreement, disagreement, abuse or whatever at the end.
Quoting signatures (the fixed text at the end of the article) is worth
mentioning as a specific example of needless quoting. The previous poster's
signature is almost never relevant to what the followup says, so it's
wasteful (for the above reasons) to quote it.
Summary: preserve only the quoted text that is relevant to the reply, and
delete the rest. Only quote signatures if you're commenting on them.
Preserve Attributions Appropriately
An attribution is a piece of text, usually added by the newsreader,
indicating who wrote a piece of text quoted in a followup; in the example
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
Dracula said:
All vampire bats should be given free sheep to feed on.
I agree.
Domestic servants get too much holiday.
I disagree.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
Depending on the writer's newsreader, the attribution usually contains some
of the following:
The name of the original poster
The email address of the original poster
The message ID of the quoted message
The date that the quoted message was posted
Other stuff
Some identifying information about the original poster (their name and/or
email address) is the most important part; it associates text with author.
Most of the rest can be left out without doing any harm - the message ID is
available in the header of the new article, the date of the quoted message
is largely irrelevant (and given the message ID, the message can be found
and the date extracted from it anyway, if it really matters).
There are two things that can go wrong. One is failing to attribute the
quoted text, or failing to attribute all of it; quite often you see several
levels of quoted text with only the first level attributed. Often in this
case the unattributed text could actually be deleted entirely without losing
the sense of the article - it often makes perfect sense to only quote text
from the immediate predecessor article, rather than from three or four
earlier articles as well. But sometimes it is necessary to quote several
levels deep, and in that case there should be proper attributions so that
the reader can tell who wrote what without having to trace back through the
thread.
Another failing is leaving in too many attributions - i.e. leaving in the
attribution for an article from which no text remains at all. This is plain
laziness, and in an article containing many levels of quoting can be
confusing to the reader.
Summary: include attributions for the quoted text, and no more.
Other Mistakes
There are other, less disastrous, mistakes that can make it harder to read
postings.
Missing Whitespace
There are two key places where blank lines should be used in postings. The
first is between paragraphs. The plain text format used in USENET doesn't
have any special way of marking paragraph breaks; a very commonly adopted
convention is to use a blank line to separate paragraphs, and this has the
advantage of marking out paragraph breaks very clearly across the whole of
the line.
A less common, but still perfectly adequate, approach is to use special
indentation on the first line of each paragraph (as is common in printed
books).
Simply starting a new paragraph on the next line from the previous, without
an intervening blank line, indentation or any other kind of visual hint,
makes it much harder to follow the structure of a posting.
The second follows from the first, in a sense, but is actually more
important: leave blank lines between new and quoted text. This is important
because when scanning quickly through an article it's useful to have an easy
way to spot where the quoted text ends and the new text begins, particularly
when the quoted and new text are interleaved many times.
The example above, repeated but without the blank lines between the quoted
and new text, looks like this:
Subject: Re: vampire bats
From: (e-mail address removed)
Dracula said:
All vampire bats should be given free sheep to feed on. I agree.
Domestic servants get too much holiday.
I disagree.
--
(e-mail address removed)
http://www.example.com/~igor/
With this style it takes much longer to spot where the new text is.
Summary: take care to distinguish paragraphs, preferably with blank lines;
distinguish quoted text from new text with blank lines.
Don't Miswrap Quoted Text
Broadly speaking, USENET articles should fit into 80 columns. A common
recommendation is to keep new text wrapped at 72 columns, so that there is
space for it to be quoted several times without exceeding the 80 column
limit.
However, sometimes you see articles where a newsreader - or maybe the poster
themselves - has attempted to word-wrap the quoted text without taking the
quoting characters into account. The result can look like this:
However, sometimes you see articles where a newsreader - or
maybe the poster themselves - has attempted to word-wrap the
quoted text without taking the quoting characters into account.
The result can look like this:
....or like this:
However, sometimes you see articles where a newsreader
- or > maybe the poster themselves - has attempted to word-wrap
the > quoted text without taking the quoting characters into
account. > The result can look like this:
Well, that's a mess. But it also loses the > characters from the left side
of the quoted text, making it harder to recognise for what it is.
Summary: if you must re-wrap quoted text, take the quote character(s) into
account.
Referring to This Document
If you refer to this document, for example in a USENET posting in which you
hope to encourage someone to change their quoting style, there are a few
guidelines I would like you to follow if possible:
Quote the correct URL. The correct URL to quote is:
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/2000/06/14/quoting.html
Other URLs may work for now but this is not guaranteed.
Be polite. Calling someone an idiot for top-posting may help let off steam,
but it's unlikely to help fix the problem - indeed the opposite might be
more likely.
Don't be obscure. If you simply post the URL then it may not be immediately
obvious what you mean, depending on context; instead saying something like
"Your quoting style makes your article difficult to follow, this URL
describes some ways to make it better" may be more sensible.
If you see someone citing this document without following these guidelines,
it might be appropriate to point them out. But note that this section was
not always here.
Related Documents
http://www.usenet.org.uk/usenet-information.html - Useful information about
USENET; a collection notes and links about USENET in general, with a uk.*
bias.
http://www.usenet.org.uk/ukpost.html - Configuring your news reader to post
to uk.*; section 3 discusses quoting issues.
news.announce.newusers - various USENET FAQ documents are regularly posted
here.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/g.mccaughan/g/remarks/uquote.html has some
remarks about quoting conventions.
Credits
This document was written by Richard Kettlewell, and is copyright (C) 2000,
2002.
Martin Hardcastle, David Richerby, Eleanor Blair, Matthew Byng-Maddick and
Lucian Wischik all provided useful feedback on earlier versions of this
document.
RJK | Contents
-- Tanner here --
So as I interpret the above references, these are really just suggestions
rather than -- y'know, laws or something. They are guidelines. Is that
correct? Who are these authorities? Do they have any sort of certification
or recognizable qualification?
I would help me immensely if you went through the refs line by line,
expanding on each for my edification. Feel free to expand with footnotes,
citations, cross-references, bibliographies, hyperlinks, etc.
I'm not clear on this whole communication thing, as you can see.
ML
