What are some tips for writing better e-mails?
The principles that guide these tips are simple: we want our e-mail list to be interesting, civil, and manageable. Interesting means posts that are on-topic and make for good reading. Civil means posts that treat list members with respect, though it doesn’t rule out a good argument once in a while. Manageable means fewer e-mails are better than more if they say the same thing. We all have enough noise in our lives. PLEASE EDIT YOUR POST. When you reply to a message, please don’t quote the entire previous message. Please take an extra few seconds to edit the amount of quoted material down to the bare minimum so that your reply will make sense. This especially helps the digest version of the list, where one long reply thread might fill a whole digest message. CONSIDER ASKING FOR REPLIES TO GO TO YOU. If you’re asking for a contractor reference, for example, you might consider asking people to e-mail you directly and offering to summarize the results. When you do this, you provide a very