I tend to gravitate toward medium-sized emotes that often as not get progressively larger as a scene goes on, but I've always admired people who write concisely but manage to keep their posts engaging. I've found that the type of character I'm playing tends to change the length of my emotes a little, and the nature of what's going on, too. If there's a lot of action or description or combat/etc going on I'll write a lot more than if I'm engaged in dialogue. That's largely becauuuuse...
I hate the long, diatribe-esque rants that conversations turn into when people thread in an extra conversation point every emote/pose and it's like you're discussing 5 things at a time. It seems completely unnatural and unnecessary, and if you just told me about why some demon is about to eat my neighbor I'm not going to be sitting here listening to you keep going on about your potential journey next week into the forbidden wood to get a faerie charm for this other thing, please, I'm still processing the demon. Then it winds around to my turn to respond and I've got to just machine-gun through all these disparate things that have come up or drop some of them, and it could totally be avoided by holding your horses and ending your turn a little sooner. Obviously not everyone that writes long emotes is subject to this, but more often than not they are.
There's a nonverbal equivalent too, but I don't find it as prevalent.
I don't like thoughtposing at all, but I think that's largely because I'm used to MUDdy environments with cultures that your emotes are about describing what your character does, what they say, the environment they interact with, and nothing else. If I'm playing a game I'm doing my best to get into my character's mind, so during RP I try my best to ignore your existence and focus entirely on your character. Meta comments or thought poses undermine that a little bit, and since they don't inform my character at all I don't really want them to change what they'll be doing, either. I think there are some reasonable places for them in the RP culture I've run across on most MUSHes -- things are less grid-oriented and sometimes you might feel you need to be more blunt/less patient with hooks, but I still don't like it. I'd much rather tease out some grim veteran's reticence in a bar through a few different meetings rather than have it be dropped on me OOCly at first blush.
Thoughtposes and metaposes can be lazy, too (that doesn't mean they always are). I've run into people that use them to either skip explaining the physical things their character would do to betray that sentiment, or to sort of OOCly explain why their character is doing something, which ends up robbing their writing of any real payoff for me.
For a simplified example:
A) Carl approaches Rick and asks, "Where were you on the night Christy was murdered?" It's clear he's not letting Rick move a muscle until he's satisfied.
B) Carl approaches Rick, sidling around to stand between the other man and the nearest exit. Crossing his arms, he asks, "Where were you on the night Christy was murdered?"
I'd want to play with the Carl in B way more than the Carl in A.
I guess the tl;dr is let me respond at natural breathers and let me try to pretend you don't exist but your character does, and I'm happy. I know these thoughts run contrary to some of the other stuff said here, but I'm not trying to say anyone's wrong or anything. They're just my two cents.
