6. Interpretation

Email shows a range of repair from all four of the types identified by Hutchby and Wooffitt:

Self-initiated self-repair…

Other-initiated self-repair…

Self-initiated other-repair…

Other-initiated other-repair

(Hutchby and Wooffitt(1998, p.61))

This perhaps reflects the fact that in email discussions, as in spoken conversation, the interactions are locally managed and "interactionally managed" (Sacks et al (1974, p.725)) by the participants themselves.

The sources of trouble that necessitate the repair, while differing in some predictable ways from trouble sources in spoken conversation, are nevertheless quite varied and include technology-related turn-taking problems, elements requiring clarification, and factual errors. In relation to the pace of email discussions, these repairs are carried out very promptly and often occur in the turn adjacent to the trouble source or the NTRI, even though adjacency cannot be relied upon in these discussions.

Despite the explicit instruction to the contrary in Section 2.4 of the JISCmail Guidelines, a frequently occurring type of repair or NTRI in the email data takes the form of a comment on the appropriateness of the content or the tone of messages to the list. This is a particularly striking feature of the email data. Participants show an awareness of appropriate behaviour which is more than an adherence to the Guidelines, although they may cite the Guidelines to support their position.

The email discussion data have several instances of refusal to repair following an NTRI, a phenomenon which has not been discussed in publications relating to spoken conversation. The data also provide instances of pseudo-repair, where a participant uses an apparent repair or NTRI for a different purpose.

An initial NTRI can provoke an entire metadiscussion. The opportunity to conduct an extended metadiscussion about a discussion which is being conducted simultaneously with the metadiscussion is provided by the written medium of email discussions. The "persistent" nature of CMC (Erickson, 1999) facilitates reflection, both on the content of the discussion and on the way in which the discussion is carried out.