Workplace Writing by Stephen Bremner

Author:Stephen Bremner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

Email requests: challenges for research and pedagogy

It should be acknowledged that at the time of writing this was a small-scale preliminary study; at this stage, all that can be seen are indications rather than definitive findings, and these are open to interpretation. Nevertheless, a few tendencies were seen to emerge, some of which resonate with the findings in earlier studies (e.g. Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007; Economidou-Kogetsidis, 2011, 2015). The first of these was that students were often inconsistent in their use of register or used language that was inappropriate for the writer-reader relationship, and this was perhaps exacerbated by an over-reliance on formulaic phrasing, especially in closing the message. This is not to suggest that the students were unaware of the importance of finding the right language for the situation. Indeed, there was general acknowledgement among this student population of the need to find the appropriate register – a questionnaire was administered to the group before the tasks and the vast majority agreed that “tone” was a very important feature of email writing; in the study of intertextually linked emails reported in Chapter 4 (Bremner and ­Costley, 2016), most of the students interviewed also expressed concern about their management of tone. This is similar to other studies (e.g. Biesenbach-Lucas, 2007; Chen, 2006; Danet, 2001) that have indicated that students are aware that stylistic differences are needed to deal with readers in authority when compared to peers.

Alongside their recognition of the need to manage tone in an appropriate manner, the general view from the group who produced these emails was that Task 2 was less challenging because it was a colleague-to-colleague message. This is in keeping with Chen’s (2006) contention that “people can write e-mails to peers in any manner they like” (p. 35). However, this study and student performance on the colleague-to-colleague task reported earlier, adapted from Graham (1998), as well as my own research in a university setting (Bremner, 2006) suggest that this type of writing is just as challenging as writing upwards, possibly more so. Further investigation would be necessary to find out exactly why they believe this kind of writing poses fewer challenges.

Overall there was insufficient demonstration of understanding of the situation in relation to the audience. Writers seemed to have difficulty in analysing the task from the perspective of the reader in terms of their expectations and likely reaction, and this was often manifested in a lack of acknowledgement of the degree of imposition involved. This may explain the ways in which politeness strategies were used – if a writer did not see the request they were making as a heavy imposition, then they would not see any need to reduce the sense of imposition through the deployment of strategies aimed at negative face. However, an alternative interpretation is that they did recognise that a relatively high degree of imposition was entailed in the request but that they were uncertain as to the type of politeness strategy to call upon.

Making a request threatens a reader’s negative face in

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