I admire clarity and conciseness, but then, who doesn’t.
Of the science forums, I primarily participate in the Geology and the Great Flood. This is despite having the dubious achievement of having forgotten the bulk of my bachelors of science level geology education.
I have long mostly lost the desire to post geologic rebuttals to creationist positions. There are plenty of others available to do such. A couple of geology degreed members who do high quality jobs are Edge and Roxrkool. One non-degreed member I’ve also (geo)admired is Mark24, who seems to no longer be active.
What geological messages I am inclined to reply to, are the pro-science messages I perceive as being of shaky quality. Often these messages are mostly solid, but get into dubious quality in some of the details (also see references comment, below).
Now I have at least two personal content (as opposed to formatting) gripes about what I often see in messages:
1 — The use of undefined abbreviations or acronyms. I’ll see a series of upper case letters and be clueless about what they mean. There are exceptions to the rule (DNA is one that comes to mind), but I think that every abbreviation/acronym should be written out in full when first used in any message. One shouldn’t need to search back pages in the topic to (hopefully) be able to figure of the abbreviation/acronym. Example (maybe an exception to the rule type thing) — Theory of Evolution (ToE).
A variation of this problem that has happened in the past — Someone will use GC. Does this refer to the Grand Canyon or the geologic column? In the message context it could be ambiguous but important.
2 — Not supplying references/credits for information sources. If you consult and use information from a website (or a hardcopy journal or book), give a link or reference information. This gives the reader a place to check the reliability of your information and a place to go for further reading. A reader should not need to post a reference please message.
In conclusion, I personally like using short paragraphs. I may very well go too far, but the other extreme of making the above one paragraph would definitely be bad. And remember, paragraph indentation does not work at this forum. Please put blank lines between your paragraphs.
And don’t be shift key impaired. It makes Adminnemooseus cranky.
Or something like that.
Moose
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