The language of e-mail 123
a style that is more likely to be heard in commercial broadcasting
than in graphic advertising:
How would you like to win...?
Why wait?
What could be more addictive than both Pokemon and pinbal ́ l...
except for a blend of both? Catch ’em early by pre-ordering for
just£22.99.
Have you ever wanted to see... if it’s sunny in San Francisco? if
there’s new snow at Vail? what traffic is like on Interstate 10 in
Phoenix? Well, you can!The status of a question – whether the sender expects or does not
expect a response – is often ambiguous. Self-answering is more
common than I recall seeing elsewhere:
Will Mary turn up? I doubt it, after last time. Who knows? Not
Jim, anyway.But these impressions need to be supported by some detailed
survey-work before they can be proposed as distinctive features
of the variety.
A similar caution needs to be expressed over e-mail graphology.
The variety is plainly distinctive at a graphic level (p. 7), in view
of the widespread characterless large bland typeface which pro-
vides the default for many mailers: 90% of all my incoming mail
uses it. But the fact that an HTML option is also widely available
as a sending format means that it is not an obligatory feature of
the e-mail situation. Much of the graphological deviance noted in
messages is also not universal, being typical of informal Internet
exchanges especially among younger (or at least, young at heart)
users. I have already referred to misspellings (p. 111), but examples
such as the following hardly fall into that category:
Helllllloooooooo!There is also a reduced use of capitalization, which may involve
either grammar (e.g. sentence-initial) or lexicon (e.g. proper