Re: [Lingo] [tlug] Better to have "bottom-posted"?

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

I think we've had a radical miscommunication here, ironically enough
of the exact sort I was complaining about. By going at my message
point-wise, you appear to have missed the overall point.

My thesis is that argument in the typical usenet style, which consists
strictly of interspersing quotes from the previous poster(s) with ones
comments on those particular points, tends to result in extremely poor
arguments that veer off into details that soon become irrelevent to the
original argument.

This is not a virtue in academia: any piece of academic writing
that veers off into point-by-point rebuttals of things unrelated to
the original thesis is simply a bad piece of writing. Academics may
certainly get into the details, but in any good academic paper or other
piece of writing these will be bookended by an thesis and a conclusion,
which is in turn summarized by an abstract. This is not what happens in
many (perhaps most) back-and-forth extended quibbling usenet and mailing
list discussions.

>  > and many posts I see in this form could benefit from being
>  > rewritten as a small, wholistic essay rather than a list of
>  > independent point-by-point refutations.
> 
> Sure.  Many of them would also benefit even more from never being sent
> at all.  But both points are true of posts written in *any* form.

Self-evidently not: it is not the case that a post written as a small
wholistic essay will benefit from being rewritten as a small wholistic
essay; it already is that.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974
           Functional programming in all senses of the word:
                   http://www.starling-software.com