What else can I do to improve my ASCII appearance?
Description
This article is from the Singles FAQ, by Trygve Lode tlode@nyx.net with numerous contributions by others.
What else can I do to improve my ASCII appearance?
Any article posted to soc.singles will be read by many, many
thousands of people across the world who will be basing their
impressions of you as a person entirely on the messages you
post, so it's worthwhile to make sure your messages are clear
and readable. Probably the single most common mistake is not
putting in carriage returns when they are needed, either typing
in an entire paragraph or message in a single line (which looks
sloppy, is difficult to quote properly, and may be truncated by
some offline readers) or only putting in a return after more
than 80 columns (which looks even worse, since on most systems
this will show up as alternating full lines and really short
lines). Most of the time, it's best to limit your lines to no
more than 72 columns, which leaves enough extra space that they
will still be easily readable even when quoted a time or two.
Even if your system can handle reformatting messages so they
look nice anyway, remember that most systems don't do this and,
if you aren't careful with inserting carriage returns, your
messages will be harder to read by others.
Other obvious elements like correct spelling, punctuation, and
grammar help make your message more readable too (and will make
you all the more likely to generate positive responses rather
than grammar flames). Another thing to avoid is typing in your
messages in all-caps (LIKE THIS) which makes it seem like
you're shouting--plus it makes it less likely that you'll be
taken seriously, since the percentage of words in all-caps in a
message has been linked in several studies to the
psychoceramicity (crackpottedness) of the author.
If you're replying to someone else's article, it helps to quote
at least some of what the other article says, just so people
have a better idea of what you're talking about. Delete any
unnecessary quoted material, but leave in the attributions (the
list of who said what) of any text that you do leave in. If you
want to refer to another article explicitly, it's best to
mention the message-ID of the article in question--don't tell
your readers the number of the article on your system, because
article numbers will be different on every system.
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