Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 14, No. 507.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
<http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
<http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2000 08:08:39 +0000
From: Willard McCarty <willard.mccarty@kcl.ac.uk>
Subject: tail wagging the dog
Dear colleagues:
Allow me an observation and a request. The observation is that lengthy
"signatures" to e-mail messages tend to be both obnoxious to the recipients
and, because of that, self-defeating when the messages are grouped
together. One then has to get past the tail of one message to read the
following one. I would think that a good signature is a compact signature.
The request is that for Humanist at least members make their best efforts
to limit the size of their signatures so that I don't have to prune them.
I recall once encountering messages from a certain individual who was so
proud of his various roles in a certain university that he listed them all
(ok, perhaps not ALL of them) in the human-readable part of his e-mail
address. A mini-cv, in fact. The result was so long that the actual address
often didn't find room to be displayed. I suppose such a case is so over
the top that one can simply laugh and allow nature to take its course. But
an overgrown signature, I'd suppose, might be the sort of thing that the
author seldom if ever has the occasion to notice, esp if it's put on only
when the message is posted. So this is in manner of a gentle heads-up, a
request to save me from having to wield the not-so-gentle shears.
Many thanks.
Yours,
WM
-----
Dr Willard McCarty / Senior Lecturer /
Centre for Computing in the Humanities / King's College London /
Strand / London WC2R 2LS / U.K. /
+44 (0)20 7848-2784 / ilex.cc.kcl.ac.uk/wlm/
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