98 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
‘DON’T GO TO SLEEP WITHOUT READING THIS’) or which
have certain words emphasized (‘Technology for YOU’, ‘For Seri-
ous Marketers ONLY!’). For messages which do not fall within this
category, other considerations apply. Because there is a limit on
the number of characters to be displayed in the recipient’s Inbox
summary, lengthy subject descriptions will be truncated, often in-
triguingly, such as ‘New edition of the Cambridge Encyclopedia
and... ’, and may be so unclear as to be informationally empty.
Clear, brief, relevant, and concrete subject descriptions (cf. Grice’s
maxims, p. 48) are recommended in the various guides, with the
most important bit of information put at the beginning of the line.
Deliberately misleading subject lines (as sometimes encountered
in e-mail from advertisers) are considered a breach of netiquette.
It is also important for correspondents to make continued use of
a subject description, once it is chosen, to enable groups of related
messages (athread) to be placed together, especially if messages are
forwarded. Even an apparently simple switch such as ‘My review’
(in the sender’s subject line) to ‘Your review’ (in the subject line of
the receiver’s response) can be the source of difficulty – not imme-
diately, but in due course, if the whole correspondence relating to
this topic needs to be gathered together, for the first message will
(typically) be sorted under M and the second under Y.^6 Electronic
filters require exact matches. Similarly, subject lines need to be very
specific, otherwise they will not be easy to retrieve at a later date:
among the messages in my folder are some with the subject ‘Your
message’, ‘Reply to letter’, and ‘Re: visit’, none of which are going to
be helpful should occasion to search out a specific thread of mes-
sages arise. ‘Writing a subject line withreal oomph’ is the heading
in one usage manual,^7 and as long as a reasonably broad notion of
oomphiness is permitted, I have no problem with that.
(^6) This procedure only makes sense, of course, if senders ensure that the content of their
messages match the subject. It is unclear just how many e-mail users retain an earlier
subject heading in a reply, but enter a message which has nothing to do with the stated
subject. This is especially easy when people respond by using ‘Reply to Sender’ (selected
in 71% of cases, in Li Lan (2000)), replacing the earlier message body completely but
7 leaving the header alone.
Flynn and Flynn (1998: 15).