Language and the Internet

118 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET

I know – remember last time?

Car

>I hope to be there by six, though everything depends on the

>trains. Will you be coming by train yourself, or are you driving

>this time? I know Fred is bringing his car.

To make either intelligible would require major rewriting, with
more explicit cross-reference to or paraphrasing of what the sender
had said. In business communication, where documents can be
very long and reactions to individual points erratically located,
guidebook advice to avoid within-message reactions is well taken.
A point might easily be missed, and it would be difficult to work
out the nature of the overall reply from a sequence of individ-
ual, widely separated reactions. In professional correspondence,
accordingly, there is a widespread preference for (3) as opposed
to (4):

(3)

With reference to your points A, B, and C I think P, Q, and R

respectively.

(4)

>Point A

Point P

>Point B

Point Q

>Point C

Point R

But in most interpersonal e-mail, (3) is simply not an option, be-
cause of the rewriting (and rethinking) which would be involved.
Message intercalation of the type illustrated by (4) is a unique
featureofe-maillanguage,andapropertywhichcouldonlysucceed
in an electronic medium. And there is a further refinement. It is
possible for recipients to respond to an original message not by
adding reactions to selected parts of the original text, as illustrated
above, but by editing the original text so that only those parts
which require reaction are left. The procedure is, effectively, one of