abstract this study aimed at analyzing a corpus of emails gathered from iranian students studying in england. the corpus contained 996 emails that were investigated by employing the framework of chen (2006) to find common patterns in the discourse of these emails. another aim of the study was to find how two request acts (want statements and query preparatory) were used in the emails. the findings revealed that the want statements were usually used in the informal emails sent to the peers and query preparatory request acts were mostly used in formal emails which were sent to professors and authorities. next the corpus was investigated to see how two sorts of supportive moves (aggravating and mitigating) were used in the emails and it was discovered that aggravating supportive moves were mostly used in the emails sent to the peers while mitigating supportive moves were mostly used in the emails that were sent to professors and authorities. this study also discovered that the participants of this study are mostly using inductive approach for email writing that is in sharp contrast of excepted email writing prevalent in english academia. keywords: email writing, query preparatory, want statement, inductive email writing, deductive email writing, mitigating supportive moves, aggravating supportive