How to quote Emails/Usenet correctly

This text is an approach to translate the German article "Wie zitiere ich im Usenet?" by Dirk Nimmich into English. It is not intended to be a word-by-word translation, but rather to grasp the content of that article and explain it in English. The original is available from here∞ or here∞.

Attributions

How do I attribute a quotation?

Many newsreaders allow the user to define a certain pattern which will automatically be inserted in the reply. Quite often this "introduction" (from here on referred to as "attribution") can be quite lengthy:


These novels, even if embedded into a (at least from the author's viewpoint) funny sentence, are absolutely unnecessary - instead one should reply using the standard technique of the following schema:


This way, it is easy to clearly identify who wrote what, by simply counting the quotation-marks at the beginning of each line (indention does facilitate this as well). Each time, only one line is being added. One can easily see which statements belong to which author.

The beginning of the posting decides if other people will continue to read the rest. If the first half of the screen is filled with garbage (or not quite as harsh: uninteresting, because already known text), many people don't even bother to read on.

On a side note: the so-called "funny" attributions don't look so funny after the third or forth posting, when everybody knows them already.

The attribution should concentrate on giving only the absolute necessary information and should not be longer than one line.

What should be part of the attribution, what shouldn't?

Most of the information given in the attribution line by most people is already part of the header of the posting. Generally it is therefore enough to use the name of the original poster as the attribution only. Alternatively, many people use the author's email address only or add it as well. But since it is easier to recognize a name than an email address, using the author's name makes more sense. Furthermore, people tend to use more than one email address to post into Usenet. Sometimes the given email address is even wrong, and only the additional Reply-To headers are correct, so that attributing the quoting with the wrong email address might be misleading.

Including the Message-ID into the attribution is similarly unnecessary, as this ID already is part of the message - it appears in the References header. Some people still add the Message-ID, since there are Gateways to other subnets that do not know about the References.

The newsgroup to which the response is being posted to does not need to be added into the attribution, as it as well is part of the header. When cross-posting to another newsgroup it might be useful to list the origin of the posting to facilitate the comprehension of the context.

The subject line is being displayed in the article-list as well as, quite commonly, in the head of the screen or window of your newsreader - therefore there's no need to add it to the attribution.

Adding the date of the article to which one responds to does not add any more information. Usually people respond to postings written during the last couple of days, so that the date should still be known to the reader - people who are interested in the precise date of the original posting are still able to track it down by following the replies up to the original. Only when responding to very old postings it does make sense to add the date of the original.

The local time, when the original article arrived on the author's machine is without interest to anybody. The date and/or location of creation does not need to be mentioned in the attribution. Both are already part of the article's headers.

In general, it is fully sufficient to attribute the quoted text as follows:


When cross-posting or re-directing the discussion (Followup-To), it makes sense to add the original newsgroup to facilitate the context-comprehension for the readers:

Quoting and Answering

How much should I quote?

It is not necessary to quote the entire text of the person you respond to. A quoting should always and first of all clarify the context, enabling the reader to understand the flow of the thread. A quoting is not ment to re-post the previous article.

In general, it is completely sufficient to only leave that part of the message to which one refers. People reading the thread either know the context of the discussion or are able to find the context by using the References to read the entire thread. In order to fully understand the message it is quite often necessary to read the previous articles anyway, since one message leads to another and sometimes can only be understood when read in context.

By quoting only the necessary parts, the reading-flow is simplified a lot, especially with respect to long articles. Big quotations often make it more difficult to find the actual new text. It is not uncommon that people do not even read the entire article - who wants to read the entire text *again* in search of something new?

On the other hand, the quotation should not be so short that it is unclear to what the author is referring to, or so that it may even appear in a totally different light.

What should not be quoted?

Text to which you are not responding should be deleted. This way you make it easier for others to read your response without having to reread old text. Also, you save tons of bandwidth on thousands of servers.

In general, signatures have nothing to do with the context of the article, and usually you are not going to refer to the poster's signature. Therefore, signatures should always be deleted. A good newsreader offers the possibility to do this automatically - of course only provided the signature was separated from the text with the correct delimiter (two dashes and a space on a single line).

Why should I place my response below the quoted text?

Usually, the reading-flow is from left to right and from top to bottom, and people expect a chronological sequence similar to this. Especially people who are reading a lot of articles (and who therefore would qualify as the ideal person to answer your question) appreciate it if they can read at first the text to which you are referring. The quoted text is some kind of help to remember the topic, which of course will not work, if you place the quoted text below your response.

Furthermore, that's the standard. This may sound as a weak argument, but since people are not used to reading the other way around, they have no idea what you are referring to and have to go back and forth between the referenced articles, have to jump between different articles and so on. In short - reading the article becomes more and more difficult - for people who read many articles it is reason enough to skip the entire article, if the context is not obvious.

And besides: doesn't it look stupid to first get the answer and then see the question? (Aside from Jeopardy, of course.)

Furthermore, you (yes: You) save a lot of time using this way of quoting: You do not need to repeat what the person you refer to wrote, in order to show the context. You just place your comment after the text you wish to comment upon, and everybody immediately knows what you refer to. Also, you realize which text you are *not* responding to and can delete these parts.

So: using this technique you save time, your readers don't have to waste time, you save bandwidth and disk-space. Isn't it great what you can achieve by such simple means?

But my newsreader places the cursor above the quoted text.

Yes, of course. The cursor is placed at the beginning so you can edit the text from top to bottom and delete the parts you are not referring to. And of course it is easier for you to place your response where it belongs - the newsreader has no way of knowing this.

Why should I not attach the entire original article in the end?

Most people read an article from top to bottom (don't you?). Quite frequently, the end of an article does not fit into the screen or the window. If you attach the entire original article at the end, many people have no way of knowing whether or not you wrote something underneath. So they have to scroll down all the way to the end of the article, just to find that there is nothing of interest. This is very tiring, especially for people who are are reading lots of newsgroups each day. Just think: even reading briefly through the article takes quite some time, and not only one, but all articles count.

Furthermore, attaching the entire original article at the end goes against the idea that you should quote only what you are referring to. Also, it is unnecessary to post one and the same article again and again and again (in every response to your response and so on). Bandwidth and disk-space issues are bound to occur in no time.

A blank row between the quoted text and my response? Why?

Adding a blank line between the quoted and your text helps to differentiate between the two. Nobody likes to look for the answer in some text they already know. Not every newsreader or every terminal is able to display quoted text in a different font or color, or even if these possibilities exist, it is easier on the eyes if there is some blank space between the two.

How do I mark text I left out?

Text you left out when quoting should always be marked with "[...]" or "(...)", while the first is much more common. Another possibility that has become more and more common is to use "<snip>".

Many people tend to simply cut out the lines to which they are not referring to without marking this change. This is usually not ment to be impolite, but rather to save the author some time. Everybody can get the entire original text by following the referenced articles.

But if you leave out parts of a sentence, you definitely should mark this as described above.

May I reformat the quoted text?

Yes. But be warned - there are some people who consider the reformatting of quoted text as impolite. As long as the text is only re*formatted* and the content of the the text is not changed, these provocation should not be paid any attention. After all, you can always view the original formatting by following the referenced articles. In books or magazines you wouldn't quote the format 1:1 either.

It is however important to pay attention to keep the quotation-mark on the left side when reformatting the original text.

What about correcting spelling errors?

In general: Don't. Even if you have good intentions, many people feel insulted when you "correct" their text. Sometimes the misspelling may even have been intentional, for example if somebody spells "broken" as "borken".

And, to be precise, this behavior would not qualify as "quoting" anymore.

What's up with those "broken" special character?

Some newsreaders are not able to display special characters such as umlauts (ä, ö, Ü) or quoted-printable encoded characters (for example =E4). Sometimes an article does even contain "broken" characters. In these cases, however, one *should* replace the "broken" special characters with the correct ones - the readers will be thankful.

Quotationmarks

Which character should I use to mark the quoted text?

Use the "Greater-Than" character (">"). This character is recognized as a quotationmark by almost every newsreader and is mentioned in the netiquette as such for technical reasons (Son-Of-RFC 1036 and successors).

Should I insert a space after the quotationmark?

Different people have different opinions on this topic. Some people think that it is more aesthetically pleasing to have a space after each quotationmark. Other people argue that this way each level of quotation adds two characters and this way postings can more easily get over the 80 characters per line. On the other hand it is only seldom necessary to quote more than two or three people before responding.

Other people like it better if the quoted text starts right after the quotation-mark. But some people don't like this for aesthetic reasons - it is harder to read, they argue. Another disadvantage of this technique is that the keyword-search provided by most newsreaders is unable to differentiate between a word and a word with a quotationmark.

A compromise can be made by simply adding a space only after the last quotationmark, not adding any between two following quotationmarks. The disadvantage of this technique is considered to be that the quotationmark when quoting such an article is indented a little bit, thus disabling a consequent left border.

In the end, it's up to you which solution you prefer - all the three possibilities described here are common on Usenet and all have their own people who willingly defend their technique vehemently.

Doesn't it make more sense to use initials as quotationmarks?
No - and for the following reasons:

• Space. Obviously it does not matter very much when quoting only on lower levels, but it happens every now and then that four, five, six or even seven levels of quotation take place (if you don't believe this, you should take a look into de.talk.bizarre). However, usually people don't have the additional space to the right to allow for 80 characters per line after the quotation mark. Defenders of the initials usually argue that the correct usage of the initials does not allow for nested quotations. All quotations should be on one level. The arguments against this are as follows: On the one hand, it becomes almost impossible to understand who wrote what in which order without having to read the previous posts. On the other hand, the non-nested quotations is broken if only one person in between does not use this style - and the newsreaders NOT doing this are in the majority.
• Because it doesn't make sense on Usenet. Who, mind you, is "P", or maybe "DN" supposed to be? What do you think how many hundreds of thousands of people on Usenet might also be "DN"? It may make sense to use this style with mailboxes, since the same combination might not occur as frequently in this environment.
• Because it is standard to use ">". This may be a weak argument, however, it may be difficult to get used to another display. Especially if ">" and "DN" are mixed with each other, it becomes more and more difficult to understand the different relations. If you are not used to it, it takes longer to read, since you always trip over unused quoting-styles - people who read a lot of news would not read the entire article.
• Because it may interrupt the automatic line-wrapping of some newsreaders. Some newsreaders provide the functionality to wrap long lines automatically, so it does not exceed the recommend number of characters per line. When doing this, the newsreader usually tries to determine where a quoting begins by paying attention to the quotationmark (">"). Initials instead of ">" not only make it more difficult to differentiate between the different levels of quoting, but they may even be "normal" text.
• Many newsreaders are able to highlight quoted text in some fashion, for example by using another font or another color. An unambiguous quotationmark is very important. Quite frequently, the newsreader assumes that a certain standardized character (such as ">", ":", "!", ">" "#" etc) marks a quotation. Furthermore, newsreaders assume that a line starting with a word-character is considered to be normal text and therefore will not highlight lines starting with the initials.
• Finally, it is a question of the way the newsreader presents the text to the *reader*. If the reader likes the initials, in some newsreaders there is the functionality to make it show these instead of the ">".

How do I quote other resources?

Every now and then you may wish to quote not only from the article you are responding to, but also give examples from books for example. To do so, simply put the text in quotes, as you would do when writing "normal" text. If you have a long quote, it is common to indent the text or you can use another quotationmark. To differentiate between the quotationmarks, it is common to use "|" (vertical bar). The use of another quotationmark has the advantage, that this way some newsreaders can highlight the text in a different fashion such as a different color or a different font.

No matter which style you choose: you always want to give the exact source of the quote (Author, Title, page, possibly edition and the year published), so others can check the quote.

Copyright

The original German text is copyrighted by the author (Dirk Nimmich) and may not be redistributed in any form without expressed consent of the author. Please see http://www.afaik.de/impressum.php3∞ for details.

This translation is authorized¹ by Dirk Nimmich and copyrighted by Jan Schaumann∞.

Footnotes:
¹ Authorization pending from Mr. Nimmich to reproduce the translation made by Jan. Jan has authorized the use of the translation already.

See also: EmailNetiquette and DigitalSignatures

CategoryInternetSociology