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

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

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Date
2010-01
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 record:
https://hdl.handle.net/10652/1770
Abstract
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)
Copyright Holder:
Authors
Copyright Notice:
This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in the ELT Journal following peer review. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at: http://eltj.oxfordjournals.org/content/64/1/85.full.pdf+html
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This digital work is protected by copyright. It may be consulted by you, provided you comply with the provisions of the Act and the following conditions of use: Any use you make of these documents or images must be for research or private study purposes only, and you may not make them available to any other person. You will recognise the author's and publishers rights and give due acknowledgement where appropriate.
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