I don't know about everyone else, but I find it hard to
keep up with the volume of mail that is sent to the reflector.
Having a subject line is some help in deciding which messages
to read, but I feel it is insufficient.
Often a thread drifts (sometimes quite legitimately) from the
subject stated in the subject line. You could argue that in this
case we should simply change the subject line - but this is
problematic. Firstly, people can be lazy. Secondly, changing
the subject may mean that the people you are trying to respond
to don't read your message (as the subject line has changed).
The problem is that threads don't change suddenly, but rather (dare
I say it) they evolve. The subject line tends to link a _thread_
together rather than linking a particular _subject_ together. At
the beginning of a thread, the correlation between the subject and
the subject line may be quite high, but after the thread has been
around for a while, the correlation becomes less and less. If you
judge what to read based on the subject line, you may end up reading
what you don't want to read, or miss reading things you would really
like to read.
I propose that, where possible, we try to summarize the content of
our contributions with an abstract at the top. This should not be a
rigid requirement - sometimes an abstract will not be appropriate.
But rather, it could be encoraged as a good thing to do. Having
abstracts will:
1. enable people to determine the rough content of a contribution
at a quick glance; and
2. will encourage people to think more carefully about exactly
what it is that they are saying.
I, for one, would find abstracts very helpful. What do people think
about the idea?
Yours in Christ,
Mark Phillips.
P.S. The other suggestion I have is that people give more thought
to the presentation of their contributions. Sometimes contributions
seem to be a mess of sentences randomly scattered in between a
jumble of earlier posts. It might be better if people expressed
their thoughts in only a few places, but made these expressions more
substancial to make up for it. Irrelevant or redundant parts of
earlier posts could be removed.