110 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
is especially strong in manuals of business communication, but the
principle has wider relevance.
The clarity of the message on the screen is a dominant theme of
e-mail manuals. Clarity in this context involves both legibility and
intelligibility. Legibility chiefly refers to ways of avoiding a screenful
of unbroken text. Writers are recommended to use a line-of-white
between paragraphs, for example, or to highlight points in a list
using a bullet or numbering facility.^20 (The increased use of bullet
points is an important stylistic feature of e-mails, having previously
beenrareinlettersandtypewrittendocuments.)Theyareadvisedto
use short, simple sentences, long ones being felt to be more difficult
toreadonscreen.Butallquestionsoflegibilityhavetobeconsidered
from two points of view – the reader’s as well as the writer’s. This
is one of the unique features of e-mail communication: there is no
guarantee that the message as reproduced on the writer’s screen
will appear in the same configuration when it reaches the reader’s.
A common problem is for the line-length settings to differ, so that
a message which sat neatly in 100-character lines at the sender’s
terminal is reproduced with a highly erratic sequence of long and
short line-lengths on the receiving screen, or fails to wrap around
at all (requiring an awkward repeated right-scrolling manoeuvre),
or is processed so that the end part of each line is simply left out.
Many manuals, accordingly, advise writers to keep their line length
to 80 characters, to minimize the risk of this happening – or even
70, if message-forwarding is likely, as the tab character which is
inserted in front of each line of a forwarded message uses up several
characters of space. In addition, any special formatting (such as
the use of bold or italic typefaces) may be lost in transmission.
And attachments may be unreadable at the other end. No other
type of written communication presents us with such potential
asymmetry.
The pressure to maintain a message’s intelligibility might be
thought to be no different from that encountered in any other
(^20) In the paragraph survey described below, only 4 out of 50 personalized messages failed to
use white space between paragraphs; white space was always present in the institutional-
ized messages.