Excessive Quoting
By Terry Smythe
Jody Kravtitz sez:
> Please don't quote entire articles when referring to a previous
> message. Its especially important that you don't quote an ENTIRE
> previous digest. This has been happening a lot lately.
As moderator of another mailing list somewhat similar to a-m, I too have had to deal with this problem. For those of us reading and responding to a-m digests through some form of offline mail reader that operates under Windows on a DOS computer, I recently learned that Windows has a neat feature that really simplifies the quoting process.
I've been using Windows for several years, and never knew till recently that it is possible to "select" a portion of whatever I'm looking at by holding down the "shift" key while mouse clicking on the top line of target quote, then clicking on the bottom line of the target quote. The selected portion will then be hi-lited which can then be "copied" to the Windows clipboard through the EDIT drop-down menu selection.
Open a new message, rather than replying to the a-m digest, place the cursor on character position 1, line 1 of message area, then "PASTE" the selected quote from the Windows clipboard, using the PASTE function from within the EDIT drop-down menu. I then simply enter little ">" characters at beginning of each quoted line to finish it off.
I find this to be a dramatically simpler way of replying to something contained within an a-m digest. The ordinary "reply" function picks up the whole of the incoming a-m digest and drops it into the new reply, forcing very time consuming select and delete functions to bring the reply back down to a manageable size.
Since learning of this neat little Windows feature, I've discussed it with a number of people, some quite computer literate, who were unaware of it. If you're not already familiar with it, give it a whirl, you'll enjoy it.
Regards,
Terry
Terry Smythe (204) 832-3982 (voice/fax)
55 Rowand Avenue smythe@mts.net
Winnipeg, MB, Canada R3J 2n6 smythe@freenet.mb.ca
Home page: http://www.mts.net/~smythe |
(Message sent Wed 14 Aug 1996, 20:38:50 GMT, from time zone GMT-0500.) |
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