The Website as a Domain-Specific Genre

The paper takes an initial look at how the medial conditions of the screen and the Internet define newconstraints for language and style of company websites. The paper first discusses how the impact of bad
grammar is enhanced by the salience and universal visibility on the screen. The main part of the paper argues
that the language of company websites often represents fossilized rhetorical structures as a paper text hangover
from the medial conditions of reading written texts and views this residue as an evolutionary stage of the
evolution towards a medially appropriate style.