The language of e-mail 107
As with other domains, allowing a range of linguistic options
increases the communicative power of a medium, and usage man-
uals need to recognize this. In any case, people are voting with their
feet: as with traditional spoken or written usage, they will be more
influenced in their e-mail practice by the behaviour of their corre-
spondents than by the recommendations of style guides. As e-mail
becomes a routine part of social life, at all levels, it will inevitably
be influenced by the linguistic mores of its users. Already many
people use it as a more immediate and practical way of sending
formal letters and greetings cards (especially when there is a postal
strike). In recent months I have received official invitations, letters
of agreement, and many other formal communications through
this medium, and replied to them in the same way. Some publish-
ers (such as theTimes Higher Education Supplement) now ask for
reviews to be sent primarily as e-mails. It is likely that the tech-
nological benefits of the medium (in terms of speed, forwarding,
automatic typesetting, etc.) will eventually be a more important
driving force than the fact that it permits a greater degree of infor-
mal communication than existed before. My prediction is therefore
that e-mail in a few years’ time will display a much wider stylistic
range than it does at present, as the medium is adapted to suit a
broader range of communicative purposes, and the legal issues sur-
rounding the status of certain types of message come to be resolved.
The contemporary bias towards informality therefore needs to be
kept in perspective.
The body of the messageThe content of the many e-mail style books is largely devoted to giv-
ing advice about how to write effective message body copy. One set
of prescriptions is given in Table 4.1. Little of this is new. Virtually
identical material can be found in books devoted to older meth-
ods, such as letter-writing, typing, and business communication.
Although the orientation is electronic, the content is largely