[Reader-list] Writing english

[Geert Lovink]

Hi, thanks so much for bringing this issue to the attention of the list.

Now that we're talking, I would like to make some suggestions.

Often the postings that are so hard to read are coming from Sarai 
fellows that are invited or required (or not, please correct me...) to 
post their research outcomes to this list.

Many of these postings lack even the most basic formatting. Perhaps 
Sarai could give some basic email and web training before the scholars 
embark on their journey.

Often there are not even subject lines. Or it says just says "second 
posting". No name of the author or intro, nothing. We plunge directly 
into the story. That's such a missed opportunity.

Indeed, the fonts of the posting and the absence of the paragraphs is 
an issue too, but this is a little harder to tackle as every mail 
program that we use is different. Still... with a little design 
awareness we could have so much more pleasure in reading.

It would be much better to migrate the very interesting sarai fellow 
postings to some special website or blogs and pay a bit more attention 
to the layout of the texts as the material is really first class. Of 
course this should not replace email/this list, but now a lot of the 
efforts are wasted, I fear.

Best, Geert


On 23 Mar 2006, at 9:17 AM, Vivek Narayanan wrote:

> As far as I can tell, the answer might be rather simple.
>
> Any messages to the reader-list that are not plain text are held up 
> for moderator approval, for a variety of important reasons.
>
> People write formatted text in their word processors, then convert 
> this into plain text.
>
> Things like paragraph breaks, get lost in this.
>
> Solution: save your text as plain text, then paste it in.  Before 
> sending, see that your mail client is sending it as plain text, and 
> see that the sentence stops and paragraph breaks are preserved in that 
> format.
>
> Am I wrong?  Any advice from techies?
>
> Vivek
>
> Pankaj kaushal wrote:
>
>> parismita singh wrote:
>>
>>> I think it has less to do with how you actually construct the email 
>>> and
>>> send it into the readerlist... because my email does have all the
>>> sentence stops, and tons of ellipsis etc., but when it appears on the
>>> readerlist, it's just one block of text.
>>>
>>
>> I think it has to do with how braindead your email client is. You seem
>> to be using yahoo! Its extremely difficult to create sentences and 
>> take
>> care of alignment in that small little box that Yahoo! mail (Sigh! I
>> work for Yahoo!) provides. A bug has been created as I write this.
>>
>> Most probably you edit in a text editor like MS Word and paste the
>> contents in that little box causing the text to become a big block of
>> text. No?
>>
>>
>>> ok - somebody explain this better to Mr. Kaushal please!!
>>>
>>
>> Anyone has a better explanation?
>>
>>
>
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