The most troublesome way of quoting in reply
Today I found this style of replying in several mails I had to reply. I consider it the most
troublesome and confusing way of quoting previous text (it is even worst than top-posting, IMO,
because you can simply ignore it). Here is the example:
...
This is
> the original sentence written by previous author.
This is the reply from the author.
...
The original sentence is broken in two lines and not only that, but also the first part is not
marked as part of reply. The second part is though. Thus the reader must spend some unnecessary time
parsing it - first his brain parses it as a reply from the author, but after reading it, it looks like
it was written by the previous author, so your brain has to slow down and parse it again. This is
very inefficient.
Very similar (less confusing though) is this:
...
This is
> the original sentence written by previous author.
This is the reply from the author.
...