I wanted to add a quick response to this Sunday’s (8/11/02) New York Times Magazine On Language column by Patricia T. O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman. First I saw the title, “Welcome to the e-mail combat zone,” with the word “virtual” printed in gray fuzzy letters behind. I quickly glanced down to see that the authors had recently written “You Send Me,” a book “about e-mail and other online writing” (p. 22). “That’s interesting,” I thought. “I wonder what they have to offer?”

Then my eyes scanned down to the end of the column to a bulleted list that takes up nearly one-quarter of the print on the page. It’s the authors’ “Platonic ideal of e-mail perfection…. what [their] dream e-mail looks like”—a prescriptive list of how to stamp out “bad e-mail” (p. 22). I can hear some teachers who are beginning to experiment with computer-mediated communication asking themselves: “Is this what we’re supposed to teach?”

The reason I’m taking the time to read and respond to Dourish’s book—and part of what the design was for this summer’s New York City Writing Project’s Advanced Institute—is to be able to read columns like this one critically: “No! Don’t try to teach this list to students. Stop and use e-mail with them long enough to find out what it might mean to you and your students.”

The authors of this column go wrong with their answer to an important question that they pose for themselves: “What is e-mail, anyway?” Is it just flip journalistic style or did their research into this question only go as far as polling “friends and acquaintances” (p. 22)? What they found out is that some friends tend to think of e-mail as a letter and others think of it as a phone call. Of course, the letter-friends write better, more civil e-mail, and the phone-friends are “good people [who] send bad e-mail” (p. 22).

The real problem here is that the authors didn’t seem to stop and think that maybe e-mail is neither a letter, nor a phone call, neither writing, nor talking—but something radically different. It’s this lack of attention to such differences that leads to these authors—and I fear teachers in the near future—to think that they can prescribe a list of what e-mail should look like.

Compare this to Dourish’s approach which would take time to look at the language being used, the specific context of particular e-mails, and would describe with much more attention to detail what is actually happening between sender and receiver. It’s this kind of approach that we need, not more prescription!