The language of e-mail 115
Table 4.2.Paragraph length (in lines) in a personal sample of
e-messages
No of Personalized Institutional My outgoing
lines in a incoming messages incoming messages messages
paragraph (Na=50) (N=20) (N=50)
1 37 (22.6%) 11 (6.6%) 33 (33%)
2 33 (20.1%) 51 (30.5%) 20 (20%)
3 35 (21.3%) 38 (22.7%) 15 (15%)
4 26 (15.8%) 19 (11.4%) 10 (10%)
5 9 18 (10.8%) 6
611 10 7
7 6 12 2
82 2 2
93 3 1
10 1 1
11 1 1 2
12 1
15 1
22 1
Totals 164 167 100aN=number of messages
rhetorical isolated queries (What time do you want me to arrive?,
Wasn’t the concert fine?), or a response to an individual point (The
Smith book sounds intriguing,The session starts at 12).
The dialogic character of the body element in an e-mail is made
totally explicit when the ‘Reply to Author’ option is activated, and
respondents add reactions which refer directly to the whole of a
received message. The process is facilitated by the software, which
makesacleartypographicdistinctionbetweenoriginalmessageand
reaction. After early experiments using indention, standard prac-
tice is now to insert a right-pointing angle bracket (sometimes a
colon or vertical black line) at the beginning of each line of the orig-
inal message (including the paragraph-separating lines-of-white),
so that (1) becomes (2):