In povray.general Samuel Benge <stb### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> > PS. please do not top-post, answare *below* quote of post to with are You 
> > answearing.

> There are advantages to answering both ways, depending on how many 
> statements I'm replying to.

  Quoting properly is an art. But it's an art which everyone should master,
in my opinion. It makes your articles more readable and better organized.

  Some people seem to lack the notion of being able to *edit* quotes.
By editing I don't mean changing them (which you *never* should do,
heaven forbid!), but to remove irrelevant parts in order to make the
quotes as short and clear as possible (but of course you shouldn't remove
relevant parts of the quote in such way that it may change the meaning of
what you leave).

  Answering to an article should usually look like this:

> Original statement

Answer to that statement

> Another original statement

Answer to this one.

etc.

  That is, quote first, answer then (not the other way around), and
answer to each point separately, not to everything in a single block
of text.
  Don't quote too much. Quoting too much is specially bad if you are
answering to a single statement among tens of others. As said before,
remove unnecessary quotes until you have the essential part. Sometimes
people use "[snip]" or "[xyz removed]" or something similar to indicate
that more essential (but long) parts were removed (and that the reader
should refer to the original article if he wants to know).

  Sometimes you might even want to not to quote anything at all.
This is specially true when the original article is longish and you
are answering to the whole idea in it, not to any specific statement
inside it. If people want to know what you are answering to, they can
go one article back in the thread to see it.

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