Contents

• Introduction
• What are manners?
• Online manners
• Informal emails
• Eighteenth-century manners
• Conclusion
• Figures:
  1. Business email
  2. Friendly email
  3. Angry email

Many of our informal emails, and most of our interactions in chat rooms, are analogous to communicating vocally in the physical world. In other words, had the interaction occurred in the physical world, it would not have been through a written letter, but through spoken word instead. Since these interactions to not have a written analog in the physical world, the conventions we use in these emails and chat rooms are often quite different than the conventions we would use in a physical, written letter. Namely, our usage of traditional spelling, capitalization, and emotion are quite different.

One of the most dramatic differences between informal emails and traditional written communication is our use of spelling. We tend to compose our informal emails quickly, and in chat rooms, we compose our replies as quickly as possible to keep the other person from having to wait. As such, many traditional pieces of grammar give way to efficiency. These leads us to often leave any misspellings that result from mistyping our thoughts, and to not take the time to think of the correct spelling of a difficult word. Furthermore, several common abbreviations have made their way into our vocabularies. These include common acronyms such as "BTW" instead of "by the way" and "FYI" instead of "for your information", and using the pronunciations letters and numbers to phonetically spell out phrases, like "b4" for "before" and "cul8r" for "see you later".

Another interesting difference deals with the use of capitalization. In many cases, informal emails and chat dialogues refrain from using capitalization at all. Sentences and proper names are often left uncapitalized, except for emphasis. In addition, the use of "all caps", in which every letter of a word or sentence is capitalized, has come to denote the online textual equivalent of shouting. (See Figure 3.)

Finally, online conversations have developed new forms of showing emotion to overcome the limitations of text. Sarcasm is especially hard to convey implicitly, since they same sentence has entirely different meanings when used sarcastically and seriously. If there is a pre-existing rapport between the two people communicating, emotion and tone can often be implied. However, in dealing with strangers, textual clues have developed to explicitly convey emotion. The most well-known of these is the emoticon, where punctuation marks are used to form a stylized face with an expression appropriate to the tone of the message. (See Table 1.)

If the writer needs to convey a more subtle emotion than happiness or sadness, another common method is to use an acronym describing the emotion. "LOL" (for "laughing out loud") or "ROTF" (for "rolling on the floor") can be used to describe the reaction to a good joke. "JK" (for "just kidding") or "S" (for "sarcasm") can be used to denoted a sarcastic comment. Most interestingly, these acronyms are usually not placed directly into the text. Rather, they are enclosed in angle brackets to separate them from the body of the message. (See Figure 2.) Offsetting the emotion acronyms like this is rather similar to the method of formatting text in the Web's format, HTML. In HTML, tags enclosed in angle brackets tell a user's Web browser how to format the text of the page. Similarly, the emotion tags in an email tell the recipient explicitly what tone to read into the message. Web pages could be presented without any formatting, or by assuming various formattings based on the content of the page, just as the tone of an email message can be implied based on the message's content. However, when format or emotion are specified explicitly, the author's intention is much more likely to come through.

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