ABSTRACT
In this research article, Hewings and Coffin investigate computer-mediated communication (CMC). Although it is written language, it has many of the features of speech, and their basic aim is to see to whether it is more similar to speech or writing. For this purpose they compiled a corpus of conference messages posted by students regarding an assignment, and a corpus of the essays written for that assignment. For the sake of comparison, they also used data from the conversation and academic prose corporafrom the Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999).
