| dc.description.abstract | Scholarly mails apparently display stable conventional principles as an emerging
genre. Thus, contributors should structure their electronic mails appropriately when writing for
purposes of discussing professional topics. However, this requirement plunges many a scholar
in dilemma as to how to go about this vital undertaking without written structural norms in
electronic mail communication. This raises the question: what is the generic structure of the
scholarly electronic mail? The aim of this paper therefore is to uncover the organizational
structure of the scholarly electronic mail as an emerging genre of computer mediated discourse.
A qualitative approach is adopted in the description of the generic structure. Through purposive
and stratified sampling, twenty scholarly electronic mails were selected and closely studied
based on the basic electronic schema model by Herring (1996) with a view to extracting the
features of the genre. Findings revealed that the scholarly electronic mail has a generic structure
which is signalled by typical linguistic elements. The paper recommends a genre-based
approach to guiding upcoming scholars on how to construct a scholarly electronic mail that
fulfils its communicative purposes. | en_US |
