The Genre Structure of Bulletin Board Messages
Maite Taboada · 2004
Messages posted on bulletin boards on the Internet represent a new form of communication. They draw both from casual conversation and from other written genres in their structure and characteristics. In this paper I explore the genre structure of bulletin board posts. Genre is defined a purposeful, goal-oriented activity, which evolves in clearly defined stages. Messages posted on bulletin boards correspond to a variety of genres: argumentation for an opinion, personal attacks on other posters, pros and cons of a certain product, demands for advice, etc. Because the goals of each genre are different, the genres will also be different in structure. This paper provides definitions of four of these genres and an exploration of their structural characteristics. The descriptions are useful in computational applications such as topic classification and information r etrieval.