The language of e-mail 109
traditional prescriptive pedagogy, the effect is nonetheless to re-
inforce a highly selective view of what language is all about, by
focusing on a tiny set of rules to the exclusion of the more general
properties of language which characterize the maintext of e-mail
messages. These properties result from the two chief factors which
define the e-mail situation: the limitations imposed by the screen
and the associated software; and the dynamic nature of the dialogue
between sender and receiver.
A widely held view (dating from the earliestdays of e-mailing)
is that the body of a message should be entirely visible within a
single screenview, without any need for scrolling. Often, this is
not a whole screen, because the upper part is needed for a list-
ing of incoming messages. Insofar as people use e-mails for brief
and rapid conversational exchanges, fitting a message into a sin-
gle screen is easily achievable,^18 and in my corpus most people do:
70% of my e-mails fit within the 16-line depth my screen makes
available for the first sight of incoming messages. When the mes-
sages get longer, and especially when documents of considerable
length are sent (as in much business e-communication), the style
guides strongly recommend that special attention is paid to the
information which appears on the opening screen – providing a
strong first paragraph or a summary. An analogy is often drawn
with the ‘inverted pyramid’ style familiar from newspaper writing –
the important information should appear in the opening para-
graph, with less important information in the next paragraph, and
so on.^19 The analogy is apt. Just as a newspaper editor will often
trim an article to fit a space working ‘bottom up’, by cutting the
final paragraph first, then the penultimate, and so on, so an e-mail
writer should assume that information located at the end of the
message might never be seen, if the reader decided not to scroll
down any further. The pressure to provide an executive summary
(^18) Less easy if inroads are made into the lower area, as can happen if a long list of Cc addresses
is present, header information is reproduced (as when a message is forwarded), or space
19 is devoted to some automatically generated copy (such as a confidentiality warning).
Crystal and Davy (1969: ch. 7).