Subject says it all.

[dougo]

I hate reading an email message (or forum post, etc) whose body just says "Subject says it all." The purpose of a subject field is to provide a summary of the content of a message, e.g. for an index list. In particular, the subject should not provide any information that is not also in the body. If you come up with a subject line and then discover you really have nothing more to say, it's a simple matter to copy-and-paste the subject line into the body.

Even worse is a message that starts with "Subject says it all." and then goes on to say more things. All means all! There's no more after all!

[Edit: Oops, I meant to post this to stopsayingthat! Sorry for the excess negative energy in my personal journal.]

Comments

[ahkond.livejournal.com]

I have coworkers who do the "subject, but no body" thing, and others who do the "body, but no subject" thing.

One guy starts typing on the subject line and keeps typing with no distinction. The effect is that the subject line is the first line or sentence of what should be the body, and the subject line is usually not a good subject (it may be something like "Here's an idea" or "how are you doing".

I want to harm them all.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

That's annoying, but I'm realizing that that doesn't actually bother me as much as "Subject says it all". It's like they know there's something wrong with leaving the body blank, but they just waste words drawing attention to the fact that they can't figure out how not to leave it blank.