Sending an e-mail message to one of our large lists, either the Open Line or the Members' List, is a not quite the same as writing a private e-mail note to a friend or colleague. List messages can potentially be read by 700 or more colleagues. While more informal, posting to a list has some characteristics of publishing. It is therefore reasonable to take some extra care in preparing list messages.

In preparing your message, it would be a good idea to use a word processing program or capable text editor. You should try to avoid writing lengthy messages formatted as a single paragraph. Any paragraph that occupies more than about half a screen is likely to be skipped by busy readers. In addition, it is useful to control the length of lines in your messages rather than typing each paragraph as a single line (i.e., without any end of line characters) and then relying on every members e-mail program to figure out how to display your lines. A width of about seventy characters per line works out well.

Here's a general idea of how you could create a message in Microsoft Word. Set your left and right margins so that the area in which you are typing is about 7“ wide. Select a monospaced font at ten characters to the inch, such as Courier 12 point.

After you type, format, and spell check your message, save it to a file, but be sure to select “text only with line breaks” as the file type. Copy that file into your e-mail program, and your formatting — including line lengths and paragraph indents — will be preserved.

“TechNotes” runs in each issue of TAP, with the aim of educating us about aspects of technology and communications relevant to our work.