Narrative Writing Lab: Emails and texting

Lab session 1

You´ve got a message!!

Hello everyone,

Welcome to Narrative Writing, we need your personal commitment to successfully pass the course; for that :

be on time, respect others, work on the assigned topic of the session, complete all the tasks, hand in your notebooks when corresponds, ONLY complete tasks will be considered to be graded.

Today you will learn a little about how register matters in language use, especially in email communication.

GOOD TO KNOW

In linguistics, the different styles or registers of language are determined by factors such as social occasion, purpose, and audience. This is called stylistic variation.

More generally, register is used to indicate degrees of formality in language use. The different registers or language styles that we use are sometimes called codes.

(Jean Aitchison, Teach Yourself Linguistics. Hodder, 2003)

To go deeper you can visit: http://www.really-learn-english.com/language-register.html.

Starting engines...1,2,3.go.

How do you normally show emotion in an email, whatsapp message, messenger message or any post? Think about it and write an answer of up to 30 words.

Did you know...?

The emoticons :-) and :-( were first used in 1982 by Scott Fahlman in an email. He suggested them to a friend of his to express emotion and mark jokes.

Activity 1

A. What emoticons would you normally use after these statements in an informal email?. Copy the chart and your answer in your notebook.

	1	2
Salutation
Body:Showing love
Body:Showing anger
Friendly ending
Complimentary close

Activity 2

You can tell how formal an email is by its:

1.Salutation and close
2.Colloquial phrases
3.Vocabulary
4.Abbreviations
5.Emoticons

A.Do you know any words or phrases for the following situations in English?

Find on the web other two examples of language you would normally use in email or in any texting and copy and complete the table below in your notebook.

	More Formal	Less formal (informal)
Salutations
Closes
Phrases and Vocabulary
Abbreviations

Activity 3

A.Look at the word list below. Are these words normally used in formal or informal writing?
Copy them in your notebook and write formal or informal next to each one.

To ask (when you want somebody to do something):
To get in touch with:
Help:
To need:
OK:
To put off:
To be sorry:
To set up:
To tell:

B. Why do you think so?

Now using an online thesaurus dictionary, find the formal equivalent to the informal phrases above. Write them next to " formal" or " informal"
Ex.
0. Hi: Informal, Formal:Good morning.

Suggested dictionary http://dictionary.cambridge.org/

Activity 4

A.Now complete the emails below with words from above. Be careful of the register!.
In your notebook ,write down the activity number, then write the emails and the answers in different colour/color .