The language of e-mail 113
an acknowledgement that there has been a previous message: direct
feedback expressions, just as in everyday conversation, or elliptical
and anaphoric (referring-back) devices, as the square-bracketed
queries illustrate in the following selection of opening sentences:
Yes, I think you’re right [about what?]
No, I won’t be there [where?]
Fine by me [what is?]
Indeed – couldn’t have put it better myself [put what?]
He’ll meet you at the station [who he?]Anexplicitacknowledgementoftheexistenceofapreviousmessage
is common: excluding replies which have been automatically gen-
erated (usually because the recipient is away), 70% of my messages
begin with an acknowledgement:
Thanks for yourmessage
Many thanks for your thoughts
Sorry for the delay in replyingFormality varies greatly (Thank you,Thanks,THX,Ta.. .). In my
corpus, the majority of the messageswithoutany acknowledge-
ment were very short – often one line or one word in length. This
is understandable: it would be anomalous to add an acknowledge-
ment which would be longer than the meat of the response. The
following seems highly unlikely.
?∗Thanks for your message. Yes.Acknowledgement is also sometimes omitted when the full text of
the previous message is reproduced further down the screen, as
when use has been made of the ‘Reply to Author’ option. The op-
posite situation also occurs, with a reply message consisting solely
of an acknowledgement, such asThanks. I have only four examples,
so it is difficult to say anything useful about them. Usage manuals
differ in their views about this practice: some warm to the fact that
a courtesy has been expressed; others castigate it as a time-wasting
device.