Corpora: sloppiness in e-mails

[Jasper Holmes]

With due respect to Geoffrey, I think that excessively long emails are
far more of an imposition than unedited ones. For myself, I do often
read over what I've written to check it expresses what I intend it to,
but that is for my benefit, not the reader's/s'.

Incidentally, you implicitly acknowledge that an email message is not
the same kind of text as a letter in your mailing: no salutation,
address at the bottom, ...

best
Jasper

Geoffrey Sampson wrote:
>
> 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