114 LANGUAGE AND THE INTERNET
The length of the text comprising the body of an e-mail is rel-
atively short. A sample of 50 personalized e-mails sent to me av-
eraged 10.9 lines of body copy per message (excluding greetings,
farewells, and attachments). There is considerable individual vari-
ation: the last 50 of my own e-mails to others averaged 6.56 body
lines per message. (I am evidently a briefer respondent than many
of my interlocutors.) The vast majority fitted easily into a single
screen view. E-mails from institutions (ads, newsletters, business
reports, press releases, etc.) were much longer – 20 such e-mails
showed an average of 30.65 lines per message (though this figure
is more difficult to calculate, due to the insertion of all kinds of
extraneous matter into the body copy, such as hypertext links). In
terms of paragraphs, my incoming personalized e-mails averaged
3.28 paragraphs per message; my outgoing ones averaged 2.0. In-
stitutionalized e-mails were much longer (as we might expect) –
an average of 8.35 paragraphs per item.
Paragraph structure is short. Table 4.2 shows that 80% of my per-
sonalized incoming messages were 4 lines or less.^24 Here there is no
difference from what is found in institutionalized messages – nor,
indeed, in my own outgoing messages, with 78% of my paragraphs
being 4 lines or less. (I was surprised to encounter a 22-line para-
graph, in one of my e-mails. I now find this difficult to read, and
wish I had restructured it before sending.) One difference between
personalized and institutionalized messages is that the former use
three times as many single-line paragraphs; this seems to reflect
the need for length to enable institutions to make their various ex-
pository (informational, marketing, etc.) points. Institutional one-
line paragraphs tend to be the occasional slogan-like observation
to which the writer is giving paragraph prominence (e.g.There’ll
neverbeabettertimetobuy). In personalized e-mails, the one-liners
tend to be a brief acknowledgement (Seeyouthere,Thanks), real or
(^24) It seems to make no difference whether the format displays longer or shorter lines in
larger or smaller type: there seems to be a general tendency to keep the overall paragraph
length short. On the other hand, it follows from this that paragraphs will contain different
amounts of content: four long lines in small type must carry more information than four
short lines in small type.