Corpora: sloppiness in e-mails

[Geoffrey Sampson]

I was interested in one particular point in Ramesh Krishnamurthy's posting,
which asked:

  How carefully do we all edit our emails? Some obviously more than others.
  If we spend too long editing, we lose the spontaneity; if we don't edit
  at all, we make typos, overlook errors, etc.

I have become used over the last ten years or so to the fact that e-mails
are regularly sent out with a level of sloppiness in editing that would be
intolerable in ordinary writing, but Ramesh's comment is the first time I
remember seeing a suggestion that this may be excusable.  He is saying that
the spontaneity of e-mails is a virtue in its own right which weighs in
the balance against the virtue of careful editing.

With due respect to Ramesh, I can't see this myself.  To me, sloppily-
expressed e-mails are just selfishness.  In the days when written
communication went via paper, there was a clear social convention that the
burden was on the writer to make the reader's task as easy as possible by
putting in the effort necessary to produce the "cleanest" fair copy he
could.  Since the writer was the one taking the initiative and the reader
was the passive "target" (in the case of private communication), and in
the case of public communication there was typically one writer but many
readers per text, this seems a good convention.  Sloppy e-mails, whether
private or circular, seem to be simply a case of abandoning this
convention in favour of the writer allowing himself to throw more of the
overall burden of communication into the reader's lap.  I don't understand
what virtue there is in "spontaneity" that might offset this.  Spontaneous
communication sounds like a polite way of referring to over-hasty,
ill-thought-out communication; we are all bombarded with far more
communications than we can deal with anyway, so I for one would much prefer
the incoming stuff to be carefully filtered by its senders before
transmission.

E-mail is not, to my mind, the only way in which the computer revolution has
involved greater selfishness on the part of "senders" in the sender/receiver
relationships characteristic of communication.  It is quite common these
days to be sent material over the electronic net which cannot be read or
used without installing some special software or engaging in a little
research exercise to find out how to deal with it.  Personally I bung any
such material straight into the electronic dustbin, but the frequency of
the phenomenon shows that many people must be browbeaten by social pressure
into putting the effort in.  Before the computer revolution, anything
analogous would have been seen as laughable, and the laughter would have been
at the expense of the presumptuous persons who attempted to throw such
burdens onto their communication partners.  That was the right attitude,
I believe, and we ought not to abandon it without a struggle.

-- I do realize that many pairs of Corpora List eyes will now be scanning this
message to find an incorrect classical plural, split infinitive, or the
like; I'll just have to take my chances on that.


G.R. Sampson, Professor of Natural Language Computing

School of Cognitive & Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, GB

e-mail geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk
tel. +44 1273 678525
fax  +44 1273 671320
web http://www.grsampson.net