Written discourses - emailLearning Objective: to understand how emails differ from

letters as written discourses in occupational contextsE-mail [...] is far more than just a minor technological development for the computer literate. Its impact compares with the arrival of the Victorian railway. More than simply an accelerated horse-and-cart for the masses, trains radically altered space and time, shrinking distances and synchronising clocks across the country for the first time. So E-mail has begun to affect the way we communicate in innumerable ways.

Peter Stanford, ‘Getting the message’, Sunday Times, 4 July 1999.

‘This e-mail English, bashed out without capitals, paragraphs and any idea of composition, is [...] irritating, tiring to read, and often simply unreadable.’

(Terry Waite)

Frank Kermode: it is hard to ‘imagine anyone writing a serious letter by email’, which ‘fosters promiscuous communication’

How do you respond to these attitudes towards email?

Challenges to the conservative view of emails:

• The more relaxed tenor of emails indicate broader social changes towards informalisation.

• Email is changing to reflect the broader and more diverse constituency of people who now use it – it is no longer the preserve of computer specialists or academics, whose language would have been more esoteric and exclusive.

• Moran & Hawisher (1998) suggest that writers personalise their texts more in email than in letters.

• Email is positioned more as a hybrid mode, a mixed mode texts combining elements of spoken and written modes.

Features expected in emails in occupational contexts

Which features of letters do you think would still apply to emails?

In an e-mail writers are much more likely to use a demotic (popular) register, contractions (I'm for I am, and so on), and incomplete sentence structures – using the loose syntax of spontaneous spoken English or what David Crystal calls “minor sentence types” (Cambridge Encyclopedia of English Language, Cambridge, 1995, p. 216).

Where the (old style) letter has a structure petrified (fixed) by custom (it uses the sender's address, recipient's name and address, date, salutation and so on), e-mail has yet to achieve this. Writers of e-mails can be unsure how to open or close a message. Typically they disregard conventions of spelling and punctuation, especially case-sensitivity, which apply to postal mail. Emoticons (“smileys” or “smilies”) - like this: :-)are much more likely to appear in e-mail than in letters.

Putting this into practice• Closely annotate this series of emails from IT technicians and a software

support engineer who are trying to identify a technical problem.

• Identify:– Special lexis and jargon– Lexical items which denote a particular register (demotic or not?)– Deictic expressions– Contractions– Loose syntax– Indirect requests, hedging– Fixed expressions; generic conventions

Research into ‘emailisms’ (Helen Petrie, 1999)

Any surprises? Why do you think ‘trailing dots’ might be the most common ‘emailism’?Do you think that, in 2016, this research is still valid?

Putting this into practice• Open up the last email I sent you, and the last

email you sent to me or another teacher.

• Discuss with your partner: what do you notice about this occupational context and the way you and I write emails?

Some wider reading ideas• http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-yo

ur-language/2011/apr/04/language• http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-yo

ur-language/2015/nov/06/all-the-best-yours-sincerely-the-last-word-on-email-signoffs

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/wellbeing/mood-mind/11839034/Mind-Healing-Tips-for-email-and-texting-etiquette.html

• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet/11681972/Can-we-turn-off-email.html#disqus_thread

Homework• Put in place the finishing touches to your

presentations ready for our next lesson.