‘Dearest beloved one, I need your assistance’: The rhetoric of spam mail

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‘Dearest beloved one, I need your assistance’: The rhetoric of spam mail

Viswamohan, Aysha Iqbal; Hadfield, Jill; Hadfield, Charles

Citation: Viswamohan, A., Hadfield, C., & Hadfield, J. (2010). ‘Dearest beloved one, I need your assistance’: The rhetoric of spam mail. ELT Journal 64(1), 85-94. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccp086

Permanent link to Research Bank version: http://hdl.handle.net/10652/1770

The article offers an overview of strategies deployed by spammers in the Dearly beloved e-mail genre, analyzes the rhetoric of spam mail and considers its implications for teaching and research particularly into English as a lingua franca. Tactics use by spammers are appeal to instincts of greed, creation of a sense of drama and urgency, and appeal to the recipient's pity and enlisting sympathy. Others are creation of rapport, reassurance, cross-cultural glitches, or universal conmanship, and incongruous and unintentionally funny juxtapositions.

Keywords: Spam mail, Junk mail, Linguistic features, Discourse strategies, Register, Cross-cultural awareness, Rhetoric

ANZSRC Field of Research: 200405 Language in Culture and Society (Sociolinguistics)

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