=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= EDline Vol. 5, no. 34 (3 September 2000) Editorial mailing list (digest version) Published by the Electric Editors =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Contents: Q & A [2md] Drowning in virtual paperwork [2me] Spelling, punctuation and grammar in e-mails FYI [3fo] Pilcrows [6] Just for fun [8] Administration =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= ---[2] Q&A ----------------------------------------------------- ** [2mb] Drowning in virtual paperwork Date: Fri, 1 Sept 2000 From: Judy Hartley, judyh@globalnet.co.uk Iain Brown wrote: > I have just returned from holidays to confront an e-mail in-box > bulging with 900+ e-mails. > > This made me wonder about how EDliners deal with their e-mail. > How do you manage your e-mail? What suggestions can you offer? > Is there an accepted 'policy' or procedure for both dealing > with large in-boxes and archiving e-mails? Do EDliners keep all > e-mails they receive, or are e-mails ruthlessly expunged once > answered? I receive my SFEPLine emails by digest, which helps manage holiday floods. I treat my inbox like I would a paper one, i.e. anything left in it requires action. Everything else is either printed off and filed or stored in a number of folders, organised by subject. The idea is to housekeep these from time to time but, of course, I never do! I do regularly clear the Deleted Files folder. ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: David Ibbetson, ibbetson@idirect.com I'm retired, so I don't have many e-mails that I need to keep indefinitely. About once a week I trim mail-boxes with more than about 1,000 mails in them back to 500. This means that busy lists like CE-L go back half a week to a week, while quiet lists go back much further. If I'm away for more than a couple of days I stop mail on most lists and restart it on my return. Personal material I keep indefinitely, and much the same applies to e-mail and Web purchases. Anything with tax implications is printed and goes into my current-year tax file. (I run one a year.) I do a weekly back-up that includes e-mail and probably includes a lot of material that I'll never refer to again. I'm a hoarder and not very efficient. ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: Anne Hegerty, annehegerty@genie.co.uk I save everything from friends and clients, all in their own little folders. The only things I delete are mailing list messages if they're totally pointless. I keep the others. I'm a hoarder too. For EDLine I have about half a dozen folders; for SFEPLine I probably have about thirty, some of them called things like 'Funny typos', 'Meaning of Liff-type silliness' and 'Really stupid questions'. I try to move stuff out of the inbox into its folder (or delete it) as soon as I've read it, as an inbox full of old messages is as depressing as an unmade bed. You can tell if a message is going to start an interesting thread or if it's just trivia. By far the biggest volume of messages arrives on SFEPLine, so if I were to go away for any length of time I would visit the egroups website and change the option to 'web only', which should mean I'd just be confronted by a nice tidy little digest when I got back. ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: Lionel Browne, lionel.browne@sand-con.demon.co.uk I have my email software (Turnpike) set up to handle mailing lists as pseudo Usenet newsgroups. This provides the ability to 'thread' related emails of specific topics (so I don't have to open/read them if I don't want to). It also means that individual emails ('postings') are expired (deleted) after a given number of days. So, rather than have to go through them and delete unwanted emails, I have to make a conscious effort to 'opt in' and mark any such email that I want to keep. I also check *all* emails (not just mailing list postings) on the server before I download them, and delete any that that I don't want - spam, junk emails, 'chain-letter' emails and so on. For this I use POP3 collection of emails rather than SMTP, and the POP3 Scan Mailbox program, which is available from: < http://www.kempston.demon.co.uk/smb/ > A very useful little program! ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: Omar Johns, omarjohns@naseej.com.sa I receive up to four hundred messages a day from a variety of lists and I read only a portion of these. Several email programs (Eudora, Pegasus, The Bat, among others) will allow you to configure filters to sort your incoming mail into separate "mailboxes". Since incoming post is automatically sorted, the post I choose to keep is already filed. When the mailboxes get too full it can cause some programs to behave erratically but it is a simple matter to archive these mailbox files elsewhere and so empty the box. Most lists are already archived anyway although these archives can suddenly vanish so it is still best to keep list traffic that you know you will need again. ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: Philip Weston, phil.weston@btinternet.com Having read a recent message from the poor devil with 900 E-mails to read on returning from hols, I think therein partially lies the answer about the content of E-mails, i.e. KEEP IT SHORT! Spelling should be correct-- the spellchecker will mostly take care with that. Otherwise, most E-mails should be treated like the old office memos: recognised abbreviations, short sentences (a verb is not always necessary) and strangulated grammar should all be used, but to an extent depending on the recipient -- E-mails e.g. between colleagues, or between a freelancer and his/ her editorial contact at a publisher notifying/requesting some point of detail should be just brief enough to be understandable: often "O.K." or "Yes, tomorrow" or the like is a perfectly adequate response; more is just a waste of time for those at both ends. For messages to groups such as this one with a general readership a more complete message is warranted, but should be as succinct as possible with linguistic short cuts where the meaning is obvious -- sometimes messages on Edline and SFEPline are verbose to say the least: we are all busy people after information, and with 20 or so such messages a day the last thing I, for one, want is 2 lines of information padded out to 20 lines of Chaucerian prose. Keep it short!! I'm sure I could have got the above rant into half the space! +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ ** [2me] Spelling, punctuation and grammar in e-mails Date: Thurs, 31 Aug 2000 From: Joy Burrough-Boenisch, burrough@bos.nl Iain Brown wrote: > What importance do you place on correct spelling, precise > punctation and proper grammar in e-mail messages? > > Should we strive for perfect spelling and proper expression, or > is poor spelling / punctuation / grammar an accepted part of > communication in the modern information age? My answer is that it depends. When posting something on EDline and any other "public" forum, I try my best to project an image of a language professional. Having said that, I don't use a spell checker on my e-mails, and once sent off an e-mail with an "it's" instead of an "its" - I still blush when I think of it! When I write to friends, I'm more casual. I'd like them to think I'm writing as spontaneously as I would if I were using pen and paper. (Have you TRIED writing with pen and paper recently? It's difficult: you don't have the "go back, erase and rephrase" option!) Sometimes when I have writer's block, I get into my e-mail program and pretend I'm writing to a friend about my research. Later, when I transfer the text back to regular word processing, I usually have to make it more formal. I avoid writing anything formal in Dutch, but I will e-mail in Dutch. I think that I am comforted by the thought of the medium being so ephemeral. Today, as it happens, I wrote an e-mail in French to reserve a room at the start of our holiday in France next week. As I sent it off on its journey through the ether I again thanked my lucky stars that the medium is informal; I felt justified in not beginning and ending my message with the formal French that I've forgotten and would have had to look up! A British colleague who's a functional grammarian at a university here and an authority on writing effectively in English, writes e-mails with no capital letters and without punctuation (except full stops). It's a bit e.e. cummings-ish, but I have no problems understanding what he means, and he hasn't gone down in my estimation. I gather (article in "The Economist"?) that in Germany, e-mailers are increasingly dispensing with initial capitals (for nouns). This might eventually impact on standard German written communication. On the other hand, members of another e-mail forum I belong to, for Eng.-native-speaking editors and translators, sometimes post messages that contain errors of spelling, punctuation, and even grammar. We all make mistakes (I believe the technical term is a "slip"), but we language professionals have to be careful about the image we project to colleagues and potential clients. So I tend to make a note of "editors" and translators who seem to be genuinely unable to spell, or who admit in the e-mails that they post on forums for language pros that they have only one old dog- eared dictionary to consult. ---------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sept 2000 From: Judy Hartley, judyh@globalnet.co.uk Personally, I loathe ungrammatical, poorly punctuated emails. I think they should be as grammatically correct as any other form of written communication. It particularly galls me to see emails that are devoid of capitals but full of typos & sloppy expression and which have been written by editors. (Is that sentence grammatical?!) ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: David Ibbetson, ibbetson@idirect.com At 67 I was brought up to believe that I was judged by the quality of my written work. If there are ambiguities and obvious things, such as spelling and grammar, are wrong I wonder if the information being communicated is also wrong. The chapter headings to Plain Words are apposite. I'll restrain myself and quote two from the 1987 edition of _The Complete Plain Words_* There is one golden rule to bear in mind always: that we should try to put ourselves in the position of our correspondent, to imagine his feelings as he writes his letters, and to gauge his reaction as he receives ours. If we put ourselves in the other man's shoes we shall speedily detect how unconvincing our letters can seem, or how much we may be taking for granted -- Inland Revenue Staff Instruction He that will write well in any tongue, must follow this counsel of Aristotle, to speak as the common people do, to think as wise men do; and so should every man understand him, and the judgement of wise men allow him -- Roger Ascham In the UK, US and Canada there is a reform movement in progress that calls for our children to be taught the basics of good English, and for marks to be deducted for bad spelling &c., even if it hurts their self-esteem. I don't know what 30-year-old multi-millionaires consider to be good writing. Until recently New York tycoons were supposed to depend on English secretaries to express their thoughts properly. * If either of these extracts had been written recently it could justly** be called sexist. ** Suggestions for a modern equivalent of this dated sense will be gratefully received. ---------------------- Date: Mon, 4 Sept 2000 From: Michele Clarke, Michele.Clarke@btinternet.com I do try and correct messages, particularly to people whom I don't know. I always have the spell checker on which highlights corrections for me after I have pressed 'Send'. I just hope that not too many errors get through. I can't see why we have to dumb down anything for anybody. ---[3] FYI ----------------------------------------------------- ** [3fo] Pilcrows Date: Sun, 3 Sept 2000 From: Iain Brown, iain.brown@ucl.ac.uk There appeared last week on SHARP, the mailing list for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading & Publishing, a discussion on the name for what I know as "the paragraph sign". I cross-post it here for your interest. (I hope the pilcrow appears in this mailing; if not, the HTML code is ¶ or ¶.) [Cross-posted from SHARP-L] From: Jack Kolb, kolb@ucla.edu Anyone know what this symbol is called? ¶ From: John McVey, jmcvey@tiac.net Pilcrow, sometimes known as pilchrow Computer people may be more familiar with this term than ordinary mortals. An altavista search for pilcrow will turn up many places, such as http://www.bbsinc.com/iso8859.html, which lists "ASCII - ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) Table with HTML Entity Names" From: Germaine Warkentin, warkent@chass.utoronto.ca John McVey writes, "computer people may be more familiar with this term than ordinary mortals." True perhaps at the moment, but the paragraphus / paraph is a very ancient symbol in written language, and the people who know the most about it and its various forms are palaeographers. See "paragraphus" and especially "paraph" in the "Glossary of Technical Terms" which concludes M. B. Parkes, _Pause and Effect: An Introduction to the History of Punctuation in the West_, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1993. That whole glossary (only six pages) is an education in itself. From: Alexandra Mason, alxmason@eagle.cc.ukans.edu Descriptive bibliographers and historians of printing also know this word. I first met it in a conversation with Charlton Hinman in the early 60s. Amusingly enough, in his _PPFFS_, he doesn't pell it out but uses the symbol only, betraying its spelling by placing it in the index between "Phrynica" and "playbills". I believe he spelled it "pilchrow". From: Paul Tankard, pgtan1@student.monash.edu.au I recall having once seen it referred to as the "blind p," that follows the asterisk, the dagger, the double dagger, the section mark (the 2 interlinked esses), and the parallels, in the hierarchy of old footnoting symbols. (I can't find the ref., but thta's definitely the order.) I thought at the time time that if it was a "p", it was both blind and reversed. Pilcrow is a far nicer name. Pilcrow, sometimes known as pilchrow ---[6] Just for fun -------------------------------------------- Units of measurement, no. 15 Basic unit of laryngitis = 1 hoarsepower ---------------------- Date: Fri, 1 Sept 2000 From: Brendan Atkins, atkinsb@idx.com.au Re: Units of measurement, no. 13 > 1000 aches = 1 megahertz Nice joke but shouldn't that be "a million aches..."? +-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+-+ Oxymorons, no. 4 Genuine imitation ---[8] Administration ------------------------------------------ EDline provides the opportunity for an online discussion of matters editorial and editorial business. To post to the mailing list via ListBot, use the following address: ee_edline@listbot.com For digest subscribers, please post your EDline messages to: bywater@zetnet.co.uk Topics might include areas such as Grammar, Spelling, American English or Punctuation. Messages should be pertinent to the basic premise of the list; they may be withheld, or redirected if more pertinent to one of the other mailing lists. The spelling and grammar of messages will *not* be corrected, but some editing of length may be undertaken. The sections of the EDline digest are as follows: [2] Q & A -- questions and answers [3] FYI -- items of general interest [4] Business matters -- items of a business nature [5] Bookmarks -- useful Web pages [6] Just for fun -- time for letting hair down! [7] Miscellaneous -- odds and sods * Administration All messages of a subscription or administrative nature should be directed to Iain Brown, at: iain.brown@ucl.ac.uk with "EDline ADMIN" in the subject line. * To subscribe to the automated version of EDline Send a blank email to: ee_edline-subscribe@listbot.com If you would prefer to read EDline as a weekly digest, send an e-mail to ElectricEds@bigfoot.com with "Subscribe [EDline digest]" as the subject line. * Homepage and back issues: Visit the Electric Editors at: < http://www.ikingston.demon.co.uk/ee/ > Archives of the EDline automated discussions can be found at: < http://ee_edline.listbot.com/ > --------- ** The views expressed in this mailing list are strictly those of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the moderators or of the Electric Editors. ** Articles (c) 2000, by individual contributors Design (c) 1996, 1997, 2000 Iain Brown Compilation (c) 2000, Iain Brown / The Electric Editors =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= END OF EDline 5.34 Next digest issue: 10 September 2000 =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=