Investigating technical trouble tickets: an analysis of a homely CMC genre

CMC has long been recognized as blurring the distinction between written and oral modes of communication. Analysis of genre has traditionally focused on either the structure of the text or an ethnographic description. This study suggests a new approach for investigating organizational genre by combing ethnographic methodology and corpus analysis techniques to examine a previously unexplored genre: the technical trouble ticket. This yields a richer analysis and illuminates not only what happens in trouble ticket discourse, but also how and why. Particular attention is paid to the relative orality of this homely CMC genre.