How to Analyse an E-Mail

• How are the style and tone appropriate to audience/participants, purpose and context?
• How are the linguistic choices appropriate to audience / participants, purpose and context?
• What do these features reveal about sender / recipient / social or technological context?

Graphological features

• Parenthesis (brackets)
• Voice accentuation – caps, asterisks etc
• Trailers (…….)
• Emoticons   :-)
• Exclamations
• Punctuation (both standard and non-standard use)

Spelling variation

• Salient (prominent) sounds  (people – ppl)
• Grapheme/phoneme omission (all – al; going – goin)
• Colloquial phonetics (with – wiv)
• Phonetic spelling (should – shud)

Lexis / Semantics

• New compounds/blends (Are you alright - yalrite)
• Clipping/shortening (soz – sorry)
• Acronyms/initialisms (oh my god – omg)
• Alpha-numeric combinations / Homophones (great – gr8)
• Specialised language
• Formal/informal language
• Semantic fields, coinage
• Taboo
• Irony, euphemism, ambiguity, humour

Grammar

• Ellipsis
• Compounds/ sentence complexity
• Use of modals
• Use of adverbials/adjectives
• Verb/noun types
• Tenses

Discourse

• Including relationship to other texts (i.e. the fact that this is an email influences the discourse because…)
• Openings & closings
• Modes of address
• Topic change
• Dyadic (between 2 people) or group postings

Pragmatics

• Context
• Relationship between participants
• Shared understanding/values

Phonology

• Contractions
• Elision
• Prosody
• Influence of spoken language features (hesitation indicators, stress)

Electronic / technological dimensions

• Constraints of text entry/speed of composition
• Electronic advantages (affordances)
• Editing options
• Expectations of time delays
• Intended and unintended consequences
• Conventions of the genre.