[rollei_list] ADMIN: Clipping Messages
- From: Marc James Small <msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: rollei_list@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 12 Oct 2005 23:37:38 -0400
Pray, CLIP MESSAGES. This is both to promote clarity and to preserve
bandwidth, which is not a major issue but which remains a nagging minor
concern. I am speaking of the text to which we are responding: we should
clip this to the bare minimum to ensure that al understand the issue to
which we are responding.
To clip, simply block the text with your right mouse button, starting at
the point you wish to toss into the outer darkness, then carry the cursor
down to the last word you wish to throw out, and let uip on the right
mouse button. Then simply hit return, and the unwanted test disappears.
Voila! We have a shorter text to read and clarity is made certain.
It has been suggested that our worst offender is a Very Senior Member of
the Rollei List. I would suggest that he be sentenced to providing us with
critical insights into Raymond Chandler or on those dinging Los Angeles
traffic signals (what would that be auf Deutsche? "Die Los-Angelesisches
Machts-Nichts Stix"?) or perhaps on the predatory warfare over Southern
California water rights in the 1930's, but he has already contributed these
to this List along with a thousand detailed commentaries on the care of a
Compur shutter and on the finer points of lens designs. But still ...
<argh!> <I grin with delight at acknowledging this worthy's contributions
to the List while disapproving of his failure to CLIP HIS MESSAGES.>
All of us fail in this, so let's all pay attention to keepiong the quoted
text to the minimum necessary to establish the points to which we are
striving to respond.
Clarity in communications mandates brevity in communications. Livy did not
have the advantage of having Tacitus as a model, and he rambles on
interminably, though he did know both Herodotsus and Thucydides as
exemplars, and he chose the wrong one to follow; in the end, we esteem
Thucydides and Tacitus far more than we do Heroditus and Livy, and that is
due to the essential brevity of the former over the loquacity of the latter.
Failing to clip the messages to which we are responding produces a mystic
aura between verbiage and clarity.
Marc James Small
Rollei List Owner
msmall@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Cha robh bàs fir gun ghràs fir!
NEW FAX NUMBER: +540-343-8505
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