No - I mean in prose. It's not a limitation of prose, though it might be of email. But, aside from skill, why should that be?
....
In the beginning, email was designed to provide a rapid method of sending purpose-built notes across a network.
Although email's scope of use has expanded far beyond the ancients' intent, our (often unspoken) expectation is that messages will be crisp and more or less to the point, even if the point is fey. Twitter is, in a sense, the apotheosis of this goal. For now.
Crafting a tone requires the luxury of time to write and re-write. And, to second Michael Perelman's post, it also needs space (or the textual equivalent).
Onlist, we're often racing against competing demands (work, children, pr0n, activism, canoodling, drinking martinis, etc) and also, against each other. Posts and counter-posts are launched across the lightning divide like contending mortar barrages.
This leaves little room for carefully shaping a context.
I cannot count the posts I've abandoned because my writing habits -- relatively slow and very fond of edits for readability and style -- have made my pace too glacial to keep up with a thread's evolution.
Which is ironic since I'm an ardent lover of De Bello Gallico-esque, Ernst Junger inspired, icy efficiency when it comes to writing. But alas, the desire for at least a bit of flair (oh, and fact-checking too) gets the best of me. The parade moves on.
.d.