Linguistic informants wanted
I was thinking it would be nice if I had time to put together a little reusable Web application that would let me create little surveys quickly and easily, for when I want to extract information from people. And then it occurred to me that there are free services out there that will let you do that, and I might as well try one.
So if you're interested, give this a try.
Note that the "see results" link is extremely slow; it might take 30 seconds or longer to bring up the page. Be patient. (Also, the way the survey system scores checkbox results is totally goofy; just ignore the percentages.)
The goal of this survey is to find out what people think about how the word "email" can reasonably be used. Please ignore the question of whether the word is hyphenated or not. Read each sentence, and put a checkmark next to each one that sounds natural/reasonable to you.
The sentences in the "informal" section are basically the same as the ones in the "formal" section; that's just to see whether people would use the term differently depending on how formal the context is. Note: The formal/informal distinction isn't really the point of the survey; for most of these sentences, I would expect the answer to be the same for formal as for informal, and I'm not looking for "I wouldn't say that in an informal context 'cause it sounds too stuffy." The thing I'm most interested in is distinctions between the formal sentences, and distinctions between the informal sentences; in particular, I want to know whether the use of the word "email" in each sentence sounds natural to you or not.
Btw, none of these are trick questions, and there are no "right" answers.
I always hate surveys, 'cause they never cover the exact information I want to convey. If you feel that way about this one, feel free to drop me email instead.