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In this article, Bromseth discusses his research into 2 Norwegian email lists: Radical Forum (a socialist/Marxist forum) and The Doctor's List (a forum for general practitioners) in which the membership was divided approximately 85% men and 15% women.  While the political group tended towards confrontational discussion and raw polemic, the medical forum was characterized by face-saving strategies and an emphasis on "brotherhood".  Bromseth argues that the latter behavior should not be seen as "feminization" of male speech, but rather as an example of positive and definitively male social practices in modern (2001) Norway.  To him, gender is constantly being constructed in relation to other social phenomena and contexts must always be examined independently to show such construction without stereotyping behavior.  This argument runs in counter to the generally accepted thoughts towards men's speech and should definitely be considered as a reminder to readers to not make generalized assumptions based upon previous theories, but instead, to take into account mitigating cultural and social factors when analyzing any speech community.

Gefen and Ridings, both local Philadelphia scholars, begin by recapping women's and men's sociolinguistic patterns of discourse as prior discussed in the literature. They hypothesize that women, more than men, will wish to both receive support from and give support to a virtual community in which they are participating.  In addition, they hypothesize that such support will influence women's assessment of the quality of that virtual community, and that women will more constantly than men rate their virtual community as having higher quality.  They surveyed 39 discussion boards, which they divided into men's, women's, and mixed boards.  As to be expected, women more than men were found to go to discussion boards for support. One of the interesting results they found is that the men surveyed also sought rapport and support, but did so more often in men's-only communities, presumably where an expectation of common language would be held, and did not rate them lower in quality, even though rapport-seeking can be considered as indicating inferior social status among men according to past sociolinguistic studies.  When the men did seek rapport in mixed-gender groups, it did not affect their assessment of the board's quality because there was an expectation of rapport-seeking inherent in the mixed-gender environment, since women were present and rapport-seeking is a characteristic of women's speech.  The authors admit that even as they tried to control for gender-bias in the chosen bulletin boards, that some of the communities were specifically support/rapport based (eg. cancer support) and that may have skewed the data towards women's speech and away from men's speech.

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Winter and Huff's study focuses on a 1996 survey of a women's only online bulletin board for computer scientists called SYSTERS. Although the study is 9 years old, it still brings voice to women who were previously marginalized as gender minorities in their field of work/study.  The authors discuss the issue of same-gender boards being both "havens" and "ghettos" for women online, and also provide some support for Cass Sunstein's theory that the internet allows for the consolidation of like opinions - both positive and negative, as in the case of women's forums and online sexual harassment, respectively.  Based upon their work, the authors felt that the differences between the genders in online communication was equal or magnified to that present in speech.

Tannen's text on gender and conversational interaction seeks to present research into gender differences in conversation as evidenced by direct speech data. The first section is comprised of data about friendship rapport, focusing on "girl talk" (Eder and Eckert, respectively) and storytelling among men and women (Johnstone).  The second part focuses on "conflict talk" both among children at school (Sheldon and Goodwin, respectively) and adults (Brown).  The third section becomes more theoretical as it attempts to rethink the nature of discourse in terms of power vs. solidarity (Tannen) and turn taking (Edelsky).  Finally, James and Clarke review the literature and attempt to reframe the discussion of conversational interruptions among men and women.  While none of this research deals with online communications, I believe that  such analyses can be extrapolated to apply to online discussions both as "female talk" and "conflict talk".

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Baron begins her analysis by situating instant messaging as a form of computer-mediated communication and attempting to create a profile for IM communications among undergraduate students.  She first reviews the linguistic differences in spoken speech: social vs. informative speech and standard vs. non or sub-standard usage by men and women.  In terms of written language, she reviews concepts related to personal letter writing and studies about gender identification of online texts. She analyzed the IM data for turn taking, sequences, conversation length, and lexical issues to determine possible effects of gender.  She found no differences in turn taking, but found that women had greater overall conversation length and length of ending sequences.  From the lexical analysis, Baron found that men used more contracted forms of words (e.g. "I'm" instead of "I am") than women.  Most interesting to me, and not at all surprising given my real-world online experiences, was the finding that women used more emoticons than men in the IM conversations.

In this academic text, Tannen begins by examining the relationship between power and solidarity in various linguistic strategies - namely indirect speech, interruptions, silence, topic changes, and conflict.  She continues to expand upon the cultural, ethnic, stylistic, and gendered differences in conversational interruptions.  She compares the physical alignment of speakers to topical cohesion of the discourse and finds positive correlations. Finally, with Robin Lakoff, she explores the pragmatics of conversational strategies from a selection for Scenes From a Marriage.  Unlike her general books, this text goes into more scientific linguistic detail and analysis which could prove useful to apply to internet speech between genders.

Tannen writes from the perspective that there are key, quantifiable differences in men's and women's speech from a sociolinguistic perspective which can be applied to workplace communication.  Although this book was written for a general non-academic audience, it can offer some interesting theories of spoken language and gender and power in an office environment, which arguably could be extended to email or electronic communications on the job.  Chapter 2 deals with conversational rituals that take place on the job: routines such as apologizing, giving criticism, ritual fighting, compliments, and complaints.  Chapter 2 discusses "Indirectness at Work" and how indirect speech can be viewed as both powerless and powerful depending upon the gender of the speakers and listeners.  In my experience, such rituals and directness/indirectness are key features in gendered speech found both in real-time verbal speech and in written internet venues.