New Technology Texts

This section looks at three examples: websites, e-mail and texts messages.


Websites





- The way material is organised and presented is influenced by the dimensions of the screen. Text that runs along the top or bottom of the screen, or down the margins, is common.


- Much of the text is non-linear. Traditional linear text is read progressively from the top of the page to the bottom, but on websites separate sections of thext occupy different parts of the screen, and we do not read them in a fixed sequence (there is some similarity here with a page in a newsapaper).


- Information i broken down into manageable segments.

- Graphological features are important, with the use of colour, animation and visual images.


- Websites are much more interactive than traditional written texts.


E-mail



The informality of the e-mail, together with the interactive relationship between senders and ecievers, makes it a for of written communication that is in many ways close to spoken language.

- Lexis is often a conversational, with the frequent use of colloquialisms and contractions. There is more tolerance of spelling errors than in and contractions.

- Greetings and farewells illustratethe informality of the medium. Hi has become a standard way of the opening messages.


- Gramatical features include loosely constructed sentences, and in order to type messages more quickly, some punctuation marks may be omitted, and lower case letters used where standardgrammar would usually require capitals.


- Various methods are used to suggest the prosodic features of speech, scuh as stress and tone of voice.


- A large number of abbreviations are used in e-mails, internet chatrooms and mobile phone text messages. Examples iclude BBL ("be back later"), MYOB ("mind your own business") and JK ("just kidding").


- Emoticons (also known as smileys) are graphical aymbols used to represnt facial expressions and bodey language:


:-) Smile


:-( anger, displeasure


{} a hug


Text Messages


 In addition to abbreviations and emoticons (see aove), linguistic features found in text messages include:


- Words are shortened, as in TXT (for "text") and TLK (for "talk")


- Phonetic spelling, as in LUV (for "love") and NE (for "any")


- Letter homophones, as in C (for "see") and U (for "you")


- Number homophones, as in 2 (for "two") and 4 (for "for")


- Grammatical compression, determiners, auxiliary verbs, etc. are often omitted from sentences, and punctuation marks may also be missing.