Electronic Mail-A New Style of Communication or Just a New Medium? An Investigation into the Text Features of E-mail  

Oleh:

Gains, Jonathan

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: English for Specific Purposes (Full Text) vol. 18 no. 1 (1999), page 81-101.
Fulltext: 18_01_Gains.pdf (221.14KB)

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/ESP/18 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

Lihat Detail Induk

Isi artikel

Communication by electronic mail has become increasingly commonplace and important in corporate and institutional environments, yet the possible emergence of new linguistic and stylistic conventions are neither well documented in academic research, nor widely covered in textbooks for students of English. This study examines a corpus of data of real e-mail examples drawn from two distinctly different environments: commercial and academic. The key text features of both sources are analysed separately under common headings to reveal any patterns of style and convention which are revealed. This analysis suggests that commercial e-mail messages in this data appear to follow the normal conventions for standard written business English. More notably, the data from academic sources indicates that some users may view the medium as a pseudo-conversational form of communication, conducted in extended time and with an absent interlocutor. In the discussion section, the question is posed as to whether either data source contains recognizably new genres of written communication. It is suggested that the commercial data examined does not contain new genres, but that the academic data may do so and that more tightly-targeted studies could reveal the text features of these genres. The paper concludes by promoting the approach to analysis taken in this study as a basis for future research into e-mail communication.

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