Register Variation in Electronic Business Correspondence

Electronic correspondence is a highly dynamic genre within the business world in which Register Variation (RV) is frequently used as a tool to improve communication but it often can lead to misunderstanding. In order to shed some light on this still unexplored area, the present study firstly offers a practical approach to classify and analyse RV within professional communication. After this, it reviews previous studies on email writing to apply their findings to this approach and, in the third part of the study, a corpus of recent business emails in English is analysed to examine how the key parameters of RV are currently used within this genre. The results will show that, not only the context, but also the roles and intentions of the senders influence an email’s register, often causing internal oscillations between different registers within the same text.