Choice of communicative strategy by students when contacting the faculty

Abstract

The study addresses the level of directness in requests for information and action written by university students to their university faculty and administrative organs. There were three data sets compared:e-mail requests for action addressed to a lecturer, e-mail requests for information addressed to a lecturer and requests for information posted on a student information forum.

It was found that contextual factors influence the stylization of the request.

Keywords

• politeness
• e-mail
• request
• directness of speech acts