Abstract
CERTAINLY AN EFFICIENT AND ACCURATE MEDIUM, e-mail is a welcome means of communication on campus, allowing faculty immediate access to staff, students, and each other. As a vehicle of the written word, however, how does e-mail affect faculty’s writing and reading of these messages? The following study questions faculty about their attitudes when creating and receiving e-mail messages. The results show that faculty do not give much writerly attention to the creation of e-mail messages, nor are they bothered much when receiving messages that contain mechanical or composition errors. These attitudes suggest that faculty, who are by definition writers and critical readers, should be cautious about how they use and view mail.
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John Piirto teaches in the University Writing Program at the University of Colorado. His articles have appeared in various academic journals, his short stories in literary magazines. In 1992 his play,The Edge, was produced by the BBC. In the mid-1980s, he was a writing fellow at the University of California, Irvine.
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Piirto, J. Warning: You have an e-mail message. J. Comput. High. Educ. 9, 115–126 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02948781
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02948781