From John Klein: > Basically, which way you do it depends on how steeped you are in net > culture. Eventually some go the third way, which is to interleave comments directly after the salient point one wishes to address. > As culture-saturation increases, the likelihood that you will > quote before posting increases. Culture saturation lulls you (read: me) into the false sense you're actually having a conversation with the person you are replying to, and thus leads to the tendency to interleave replies with with each sentence as it occurs. > In personal e-mail, it's generally less > important than it is on newsgroups and lists - Interleaving is often more useful on personal (informal) e-mail, which is, in fact, more like a conversation than multi-participant list discussions are, and it can get exasperating to have every sentence you wrote appended with a comment (or worse have sentences interrupted in the middle). > top-posting makes it harder > for new readers to get into the conversation, since they are given the > least comprehensible message first, and the data they need to > understand > it is buried several screens down. Interleaving at least goes point by point, which is good for clarity's sake (as long as multiple replies (and parenthetical side-statements) don't get nested too deeply), but, as you can see, it does have its own drawbacks. > Imagine the movie Memento if this helps. I prefer the I Never Promised You A Rose Garden approach to E-mail. Help! I'm an Orange Zebra! (Noam Raphael Izenberg)