Rhetorically
effective email messages tend toward brevity and succinctness, even terseness.
Context
is supplied through copying another's message rather than through summarizing
and referencing others. Paragraphs are reduced to a sentence or two; sentences
are reduced to meaning-laden fragments; conventional phrases are condensed to
acronyms (e.g., BTW for "by the way," IMO for "in my opinion");
words are contracted and abbreviated (e.g., "my $.02" for "my
two cents worth, " b/c for “because”).
This terseness has led to the use of emoticons as nonverbal cues to tone.
|
: ) |
: p |
: ( |
:-0 |
This
creative use of punctuation marks as pictorial elements has no equivalent in
standard print texts.
Certain
punctuation marks tend to disappear as punctuation marks. The apostrophe, for
instance, is almost never needed for meaning, so it is dispensed with. Many
writers altogether dispense with capitalization in email for the sake of speed
in keyboarding. For the same reason, many writers (even academic writers) do not
concern themselves with editing misspellings or other errors in email, though
they may be scrupulous proofreaders when they write for publication.