Flouting the Netiquette Rules in the Academic Correspondence in Iran

Much has been written on netiquetting in the past few years. With all these, however, for a number of reasons, we are still far from having a well-defined mechanism for the analysis of netiquetting in Correspondence in general and academic one in Particular. It is likely that there are not clear-cut standardized and socially acceptable rules and we are not aware of how and when such rules are flouted. Having this in mind, the purpose of this study was twofold; first, attempt was made to give a vivid account of the concept of netiquetting and second to give a report on the effect of gender and educational level on flouting netiquette rules in Iranian academic correspondence. To this end, 100 e-mails sent to the Ninth International TELLSI Conference in applied linguistics were put to analysis. The findings revealed that participants' gender and educational level affect flouting the netiquette rules. Females consider netiquettes more than males and participants with higher educational level flout the mentioned rules less than the ones with lower educational degrees. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.