What is Communication Through E-mail

Communication by electronic mail has become a widely used medium within various organizations. Yet, the possible emergence of various discourse features is not widely discussed in the literature. This chapter investigates the discourse features of real examples of e-mail messages drawn from an international commercial source in Turkey from several aspects; functional categories, stylistic features and register. Analysis of functional categories suggests that messages are used to disseminate information for a variety of work-related purposes to inform, to request, to direct, and to praise. Stylistic analysis reveals that messages contain various features analogous to spoken discourse. At the level of register, messages are found to display various levels of formality. From the analysis, those features commonly used in e-mail messages are illustrated with reference to sample data. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the findings and suggestions that the future research might take.