Second Look at Email

Description

Jen Robinson's Email

• greeting, "Hello there!"
• 1 attachment
• uses different links
• has email symbols like @.
• abbreviations: MLIS, youth/YA,
• has internet sites without links: flickr, myspace, friendstr, librarything, and deli.ci.ous
• sign off is "Best Regards, Jen Robinson"
• Three paragraphs
• First paragraph double the other two
• uses complex/compound sentences with punctuation like dashes, colons, semicolons, etc.
• uses parenthesis and quotation marks
• times new roman font

Michael Morgon's Reply

• Greets with a "Hi Jen-"
• has three paragraphs all relatively the same size
• signs off with "- michael" lower case again?
• uses abbreviations or slang: YaLit?, LUC, N Minnestota, newbies
• has asterics instead of quotations around the word "can"
• uses longer sentences, complex sentences
• times new roman font

Analysis

From the patterns of speech and sentence structure in both of these emails, you can tell that they are a mix of informal and formal formats. They use slang terms and jargon language that sound more informal. However that is mixed with longer, more complex sentences. Overall, they are more informal, but have touches of formality in their writing as well.

I find it interesting that Jen Robinson signs off with a "Best Regards, Jen Robinson," but a very informal greeting of "Hello there!" Michael's greeting is just as informal as his sign off, unless a lowercase "m" in "- michael" shows even more informality. But that's just another example of that informal/formal mixture in these emails.

I also noticed that the emails were constructed very similar. Both had three paragraphs and were about the same size. Both emails start off more personal and informal and then go into more business--like topics.

Interpretation

It took Michael about four days to respond to Jen's email. This implies that Michael doesn't thing Jen's email isn't a priority or just doesn't know this person very well so doesn't feel guilty about not responding right away.

You can assume that they each know England very well, since they both lived there. Michael uses terms like LUC, Paddington Station, and Heathrow. This shows they possibly have some kind of connection beyond blogs and wikis even if it's just a familiar place.

Jen and Michael are most likely people in the English field. You can tell this from the content of the emails. But even if the content didn't devulge this, it would probably show by their use of terms for colleges and/or degrees.