Corpora: sloppiness in e-mails

[Steven Krauwer]

Geoffrey Sampson wrote:

> 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.
...
> 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.

There seems to be an underlying assumption here that emails should
primarily be seen as the successors of written letters, transported
via a different medium. I'm not so sure that this is the case. If I
look at the emails I send out and receive, I can distinguish at least
three different categories:
- ordinary letters: the type Geoffrey is referring to
- chat: quick, spontaneous communications
- documents sent as attachments (reports, articles, etc)

They are all used in different ways, in different contexts, and
have different requirements.

I write most of my ordinary letters off-line, in plain ASCII,
with a decent editor, reasonably formatted, and sometimes even
checked for typos and spelling errors, very much the way I did
it before I started using computers.

Chat is always written on-line, hardly ever corrected, poorly
formatted -- very similar to what happens when I speak. Geofffrey,
are you implying that this is an improper way of communicating, or
is your message that even for spoken communication you would prefer
people to read their (gramatically correct) sentences from a piece
of paper?

Attachments come in various types, some of which require special
software, as Geoffrey correctly points out -- but isn't this a small
and easy to remedy disadvantage compared to the advantage of being
able to exchange documents (for information or for collaborative
authoring) within seconds (as opposed to weeks as we had in the
past)? It would of course have been much better if  we had one
generally accepted standard format for document exchange, just as
it would have been easier if we all used the same metric system,
the same voltage and the same currency.

But I wonder how big the problem really is, and how many different
formats we use in our day-to-day communications. I had a quick look
at my  own mail archive, and the only formats I encountered were
MS Word, RTF, PostScript, PDF, LaTeX and HTML (plus a birthday
card with music from my daughter).

I don't remember to have spent more than a few minutes finding
and installing viewers for each of them, except for LaTeX, which
is indeed a real pain in the neck (and here I follow Geoffrey's
strategy: off to the dustbin unopened -- and please do not
interpret this as a quality judgement, because it is a wonderful
product in many respects!).

To summarize: I would say that Geoffrey is right about email
letters, wrong in ignoring the spontaneous chat function of
email, and he seems to be exaggerating the disadvanteges and
ignoring the advantages of sending documents as attachments.

Steven
______________________________________________________________________
Steven Krauwer,     UiL OTS,   Trans 10,  3512 JK Utrecht,   Nederland
phone: +31 30 2536050, fax: +31 30 2536000, email: s.krauwer at let.uu.nl
                     http://www-sk.let.uu.nl