Stylistic Features of Business E-mails

E-mail has become, in recent years, due to the increasing use of the Internet, one of the most common, if not, the most important means of business and personal communication. At the end of the 20th century, e-mail was widely adopted as a means of communication between companies, replacing many of the functions of workplace memoranda. It is a main communication medium and the corporate world could no longer function without it. This paper analyzes a variety of stylistic features of business e-mails, including the use of contractions, abbreviations, ellipsis, characteristics relating to grammatical complexity. In e-mails, the tendency is towards linguistic economy, expressivity and the users’ attempts to imitate an informal oral style. The majority of linguistic characteristics that differentiate e-mail from traditional workplace means of communication function as markers of informal style and reflect the fact that e-mail users seek to imitate spoken conversational style to express a friendly orientation towards the people they address to. In the same time, e-mail users show the willingness to experiment with language, leading to the creation of a variety of communication with a more conversational flavour than other forms of writing. Key-words: business e-mail, stylistic features, linguistic features