Readable Email
Todd Walton <[email protected]>
| Newsgroups | gmane.network.freenet.general |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <[email protected]> |
The active community of Freenet developers is top-notch with respect to this issue, with a few notable exceptions. from "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html : ========== Write in clear, grammatical, correctly-spelled language We've found by experience that people who are careless and sloppy writers are usually also careless and sloppy at thinking and coding (often enough to bet on, anyway). Answering questions for careless and sloppy thinkers is not rewarding; we'd rather spend our time elsewhere. So expressing your question clearly and well is important. If you can't be bothered to do that, we can't be bothered to pay attention. Spend the extra effort to polish your language. It doesn't have to be stiff or formal — in fact, hacker culture values informal, slangy and humorous language used with precision. But it has to be precise; there has to be some indication that you're thinking and paying attention. Spell, punctuate, and capitalize correctly. Don't confuse "its" with "it's", "loose" with "lose", or "discrete" with "discreet". Don't TYPE IN ALL CAPS, this is read as shouting and considered rude. (All-smalls is only slightly less annoying, as it's difficult to read. Alan Cox can get away with it, but you can't.) More generally, if you write like a semi-literate boob you will very likely be ignored. Writing like a l33t script kiddie hax0r is the absolute kiss of death and guarantees you will receive nothing but stony silence (or, at best, a heaping helping of scorn and sarcasm) in return. If you are asking questions in a forum that does not use your native language, you will get a limited amount of slack for spelling and grammar errors — but no extra slack at all for laziness (and yes, we can usually spot that difference). Also, unless you know what your respondent's languages are, write in English. Busy hackers tend to simply flush questions in languages they don't understand, and English is the working language of the Internet. By writing in English you minimize your chances that your question will be discarded unread. ========== -todd _______________________________________________ chat mailing list [email protected] Archived: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.freenet.general Unsubscribe at http://dodo.freenetproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/chat Or mailto:[email protected]?subject=unsubscribe