Although previous research has demonstrated a number of factors that affect the linguistic style of e-mails (e.g., sex of the sender and recipient), the present study emphasized the important role of recipient status on the personalization and politeness of educational e-mails. A total of 66 female undergraduates were asked to compose e-mails to a male or female peer or professor requesting study help for an upcoming exam. Results showed that participants wrote significantly more personalized and polite e-mails to peers, although e-mails to professors displayed significantly more written complexity.
Baron, N.S. ( 1998). Letters by phone or speech by other means: The linguistics of e-mail. Language and Communication, 18, 133-170.
2.
Biesenbach-Lucas, S. ( 2007). Students writing e-mails to faculty: An examination of e-politeness among native and non-native speakers of English. Language Learning and Technology, 11, 59-81.
3.
Colley, A., & Todd, Z. ( 2002). Gender-linked differences in the style and content of e-mails to friends. Journal of Language and Social Psychology , 21, 380-392.
4.
Colley, A., Todd, Z., Bland, M., Holmes, M., Khanom, N., & Pike, H. ( 2004). Style and content in e-mails and letters to male and female friends. Journal of Language and Social Psychology , 23, 369-378.
5.
Ducheneaut, N., & Watts, L.A. ( 2005). In search of coherence: A review of e-mail research. Human-Computer Interaction, 20, 11-48.
6.
Duran, R.L., Kelly, L., & Keaten, J.A. ( 2005). College faculty use and perceptions of electronic mail to communicate with students. Communication Quarterly, 53, 159-176.
7.
Duthler, K.W. ( 2006). The politeness of requests made via e-mail and voice-mail: Support for the hyperpersonal model. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11, 500-521.
8.
Hartford, B.S., & Bardovi-Harlig, K. (1996). "At your earliest convenience:" A study of written student requests to faculty. In L. F. Bouton (Ed.), Pragmatics and language learning (Vol. 7, pp. 55-69). Urbana, IL: DEIL .
9.
Hayes, A.F., & Krippendorff, K. (2007). Answering the call for a standard reliability measure for coding data. Communication Methods and Measures, 1, 77-89.
10.
Herring, S.C. ( 1993). Gender and democracy in computer-mediated communication . Electronic Journal of Communication, 3(2). Retrieved from http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~herring/ejc.txt
11.
Holtgraves, T.M. ( 2002). The interpersonal underpinnings of talk: Face management and politeness. In T. M. Holtgraves (Ed.), Language as social action (pp. 37-63). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
12.
Jessmer, S.L., & Anderson, D. ( 2001). The effect of politeness and grammar on user perceptions of electronic mail. North American Journal of Psychology, 3, 331-346.
13.
Lewandowski, G.W., & Harrington, S. (2006). The influence of phonetic abbreviations on the evaluation of student performance. Current Research in Social Psychology, 11, 215-226.
14.
Lightfoot, J.M. ( 2006). A comparative analysis of e-mail and face-to-face communication in an educational environment. Internet and Higher Education , 9, 217-227.
15.
Mallon, R., & Oppenheim, C. ( 2002). Style used in electronic mail. Aslib Proceedings, 54, 8-22.
16.
O’Kane, P., & Hargie, O. ( 2007). Intentional and unintentional consequences of substituting face-to-face interaction with e-mail: An employee-based perspective. Interacting With Computers, 19, 20-31.
17.
O’Kane, P., Palmer, M., & Hargie, O. ( 2007). Workplace interactions and the polymorphic role of e-mail . Leadership and Organization Development Journal, 28, 308-324.
18.
O’Neill, R., & Colley, A. ( 2006). Gender and status effects in student e-mails to staff . Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 22, 360-367.
19.
Palomares, N.A. ( 2008). Explaining gender-based language use: Effects of gender identity salience on references to emotion and tentative language in intra- and intergroup contexts. Human Communication Research, 34, 263-286.
20.
Reid, S.A., Keerie, N., & Palomares, N.A. (2003). Language, gender salience, and social influence. Journal of Language and Social Psychology , 22, 210-233.
21.
Rubin, D.L. & Greene, K. ( 1992). Gender-typical style in written language. Research in the Teaching of English, 26, 7-40.
22.
Sheer, V.C., & Fung, T.K. ( 20 07). Can e-mail communication enhance professor-student relationship and student evaluation of professor? Some empirical evidence. Journal of Educational Computing Research, 37, 289-306.
23.
Stephens, K.K., Houser, M.L., & Cowan, R.L. ( 2009). R u able to meat me: The impact of students’ overly casual email messages to instructors. Communication Education , 58, 303-326.
24.
Walther, J.B. ( 2007). Selective self-presentation in computer-mediated communication: Hyperpersonal dimensions of technology, language, and cognition. Computers in Human Behavior, 23, 2538-2557.
