Corpora: sloppiness in e-mails

Tue Apr 10 14:16:39 UTC 2001

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> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 11:18:35 +0200
> From: Steven Krauwer <steven.krauwer at let.uu.nl>
> Organization: Utrecht University / ELSNET
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> To: Geoffrey Sampson <geoffs at cogs.susx.ac.uk>
> CC: corpora at hd.uib.no
> Subject: Re: Corpora: sloppiness in e-mails
> References: <E14mYij-0000N4-00 at lune.crn.cogs.susx.ac.uk>
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> 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
>
>