The Maxims of Werry
Christopher Werry (1996) did one of the first studies of chatrooms/IWD. A few of his findings:
-Chatrooms attempt to imitate speech: “…and almost manic tendency to produce auditory and visual effects in writing, a straining to make written words imitate speech.”
-Paralinguistic clues “create the effects of spoken delivery”
-Participants mix and match language to create a “bricolage of discursive fragments drawn from songs, TV characters and a variety of different social speech types”
Werry noted a tendency towards brevity and a minimal number of keyboard strokes. These produced the following effects:
-Short turns (avg. 6 words)
-Heavily abbreviated forms (leaving out letters, etc.)
-Words deleted (i.e., no “I” pronoun)
-Letter homophones (RU= Are you)
-‘key bindings’ of letter homophones, representing phrases (cyal8r)
‘Paralinguistic clues’ included:
-Reduplicated letters for emphasis (soooooooo slow)
-Suspension points and hyphens to break up conversation (And…)
-Capitalisation for emphasis (I AM VERY ANGRY)
-Colloquial and phonetic spelling (fx= effects)
-Actions/gestures can also be represented through ‘emoticons’
This is all taken from the text "The Language of ICT"—available from the library (I think).
