122 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
nervousness about losing control of format; but then suddenly
that bridgehead collapsed, and now anyone will send you more or
less anything by e-mail, accepting that an editorial re-formatting
will inevitably come into play.The willing surrender of control over one’s written or spoken out-
put is not in itself novel: journalists, for example, have long been
used to having their copy altered by senior editors before it appears
inprint;andoneneverknowsjusthowmuchofaradioortelevision
interview will end up being used, or in what way editorial ‘cutting
and pasting’ will affect what one has said. But e-mail permits the
extension of such practices to a very wide range of communica-
tive behaviours previously immune to such ‘interference’, and the
consequences have yet to be explored.
Features such as screen structure, message openings and closing,
message length, dialogic strategies, and framing are central to the
identification of e-mail as a linguistic variety. This is not to deny
the presence of other, more local points of stylistic significance, in
relation to graphology, grammar, and lexicon, but these are not
so critical. There has been a tendency to highlight the informal
features of messages – such as the use of contractions, loose sen-
tence construction, subject ellipsis (Will let you know), colloquial
abbreviations (bye,cos,v slow,s/thing), and ‘cool’ acronyms (LOL,
CU, p. 85) – but these are plainly not indicative of the variety as
a whole, as many messages do not use them. Doubtless, given the
question/answer basis of many exchanges, an analysis of sentence
types will reveal a distinctive bias; for example, the intensity of
questioning seems to be greater than in traditional letters, or even
inconversation(whererapid-firequestioningofthetypeillustrated
below would be considered a harangue):
Am I asking too much? Does this seem workable to you? Can you
get to it, do you think? Do you∗want∗to get to it?!Rhetorical questions also seem to be commoner in e-mails than
in other varieties of written English, apart from certain types of
literary expression. Advertising e-mails are full of them, reflecting