Gently KISSED eMails

More in the Discussion of RFF Group Jargon

Often members are told to remember to KISS their messages within the group.

In a discussion of meeting at one of the cons, members tended to reply with such enthusiasm that they forgot to delete extraneous parts of the message to which they were replying. After complaints over the length of reply emails, the high memory requirements for downloading a reply that included EVERY previous message in the thread plus the reams of information that Yahoo! Groups tacks onto each message, and the redundancy of reading each reply containing reply within reply..., Dave, the Group's owner-founder-moderator, knew we had a problem.

Stupid or Sweetie?

Dave claimed to use "Sweetie" among friends. I figured that guys like someone with a name like J. Gunn would object to "Sweetie" and might prefer stupid, but Jim G. said he didn't mind being called Sweetie under the circumstances. To make matters worse, back in early September, Dave wrote, "Remember KISS (Keep It Simple Silly) is key..."

Dave instituted the KISS rule. "Keep it Simple Stupid"--or more nicely put, "Keep it Simple Sweetie"--and reminded members of the technique for solving the large-Kb-download, redundancy problem. Of course, this, too was a reply within a reply...but he KISSed.

Now anyone who gets frustrated reminds us all with the instruction to KISS. And some use the term to indicate that KISSing has in fact occurred to the rest of the reply message sans extraneous stuff.

Dave even recently reminded us with, "We need to KISS everything on this mailing list....If you KISS then I have a chance to give you a timely response."

Then he added, "Who said Sorry this is so long but I did not have the time to KISS?"

Some now type KISSED or KISSing or even ---KISSED--- to show where previous email quotes were removed.

But it didn't stop there. Me being me, I had to make a big deal out of it all. So once I remarked in the midst of a dialog chock full of redundancies, "KISSES but no hugs." This got no response. Then I started playing with the words. "Kissed, but no hugs," and "Kissed away." However, this got no response, either. Not even an lol or a :) or an ;). Ah, well. Maybe I'll get attention if I write a blog post. Uhm...

How to KISS: When you reply to a group email, remove the parts of the original message that are not essential to your reply.

To see examples of why KISSing is necessary, visit the group site and take a look at the messages by topic. Within a topic, expand the topic thread. Check out a few topics by using the Prev link to see older topic threads. You will quickly see the need for KISSing, especially if you go back to messages from a few months or years ago.

Of course, the KISS term is still used to remark on making emails, instructions, and any writing succinct. Maybe KISS really means, "Keep it simple and succinct."