Daring Fireball on top-posting when replying to e-mails

Daring Fireball on top-posting when replying to e-mails

This is one of those debates that never dies. Some people, like Mr Gruber, loathe top-posting (starting your reply above the quoted section), although Mr Gruber’s customarily well-thought reasoning seems to be absent here. I much prefer it, because contrary to Gruber et al.’s efforts to bring their carefully-selected quotes to focus, I think they should be tucked out of the way.

Writing a worthwhile and meaningful correspondence means being able to reference a previous conversation without having to resort to cutting and pasting. Putting some effort into communicating means doing some writing. There are so many reasons to do this: the newly-written text will be more engaging to the reader; it will flow like proper prose; it will reveal your interpretation of what the other person said; and not least of all, it will look like you actually care about what you’re doing.

The quoted text needs only to be there in case the recipient really wants to go back and read their original letter, to save them the trouble of hunting it down in their e-mail client. Thus, its placement, which corresponds to its importance.

(Edit: significantly lessened my rant.)