What can we learn from emails?

by Rachele De Felice

Following on from Prof Ronald Carter’s blog entry ‘A few words on corpus linguistics’, Dr Rachele De Felice looks in more detail at what we can learn from the language of emails.

Email communications
How often do you use email for professional purposes? According to some reports, “the average worker fields more than 100 emails every day”, and most people in other walks of life also often have to write a business email. If email communication is central to your business, you probably make sure that your message comes across as professional, effective, and polite – but have you ever thought about just what it is in the message that gives this impression?

Everyone has their own writing style, of course, but there are certain words and phrases that tend to appear very often in professional email communication as a typical, almost expected way of expressing something – so it is useful to know what they are, and when to use them. Continue reading “What can we learn from emails?”

A few words on corpus linguistics part 2

by Ron Carter

Part 2 of 2

In the second of this two-part blog entry, Prof. Ronald Carter of the University of Nottingham looks in more detail at the kind of information corpora can reveal about the use of language and why this is so important for the development of language teaching materials. Continue reading “A few words on corpus linguistics part 2”