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Article published In:
Register Studies
Vol. 4:1 (2022) ► pp.1–29

Stylistic variation in email

ORCID logo | Carnegie Mellon University
ORCID logo | Carnegie Mellon University
This study explores how email is partly shaped by writers’ positions within a corporate structure. This stylistic variation is measurable at scale and can be described by messages’ rhetorical organizations and orientations. The modeling was carried out on a subset of the Enron email corpus, which was processed using the dictionary-based tagger DocuScope. The results identify four stylistic variants (Trained/Technical Support, Decision-Making, Everyday Workplace Interaction, and Engaged Planning), each realizing distinctive combinations of features reflective of their communicative functions. In Trained/Technical Support emails, for example, constellations of words and phrases associated with informational production and facilitation are marshaled in fulfilling routine guidance-seeking and guidance-giving tasks. While writers’ positions motivate stylistic tendencies (e.g., members of upper-level management compose a majority of their messages in the Decision-Making style), all writers avail themselves of a variety of styles, depending on audience and purpose, suggesting that learners might benefit from developing adaptable communicative repertoires.
Keywords: professional communication, computational rhetoric, corpus analysis, computer-mediated communication
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1The email corpus
    • 2.2DocuScope
    • 2.3Discriminant analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Overview of stylistic variation
    • 3.2Trained/Technical Support (Style 1)
    • 3.3Decision-Making (Style 2)
    • 3.4Everyday Workplace Interaction (Style 3)
    • 3.5Engaged Planning (Style 4)
  • 4.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20023.bro
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