On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 02:14:43PM +0000, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com wrote: ...
Anyway, I wouldn't write a letter with nothing worth reading on the first page. I don't write articles with nothing in the first paragraph.
Nor do I, but there is a well-established tradition in written English of the preamble. One could say that a brief quote to set the the context of a statement is perfectly good practice. Of course some people take it to excess like the ones who wrote this declaration a couple of hundred or so years ago: ...
I'm not sure it's fair to say they took it to excess. All those words mean something, bunkie. Probably each one had a proponent who would not have signed had not that word been in there, to give just that shade of meaning to the document. It was not written at random, unlike some messages seen on the great public Internet. ;-) [Present company excepted, of course.] Much as we may snicker at the legal verbiage in some documents, many of those words are there to close some loophole or another. [The rest are just there for us to snicker at.] -- Joe Yao ----------------------------------------------------------------------- This message is not an official statement of OSIS Center policies.