Computer-mediated communication: experiments with e-mail readability

Abstract

The paper discusses the nature of electronic mail and its role in computer mediated communication (CMC). It describes a statistical method for quantitative and qualitative e-mail analysis. A large set of data from a number of newsgroups has been analysed to elicit some text attributes, such as number of words, length of sentences and other stylistic characteristics. Readability scores have also been obtained by using recognised assessment methods. These text attributes were used for building and analysing of two types of one-dimensional newsgroups’ profiles, one by length of texts and the second by readability scores. The results provide an insight into the issue of poor e-mail readability that can lead to considerable ambiguity of information transfer.