Wired for Communication
E-Mail Etiquette: How Not to Communicate with Your Professor
From: student@college.edu
Sent: Tuesday, September 9, 2014 11:42 A.M.
To: professor@college.edu
hey, sorry i missed class today . . . i had a little too much fun last nite had a rough time waking up ;)
can you E-mail me your teaching notes ASAP? Tnx.
E-mails, when used effectively, are a valuable educational tool. They allow college students to ask questions outside of class and let professors provide instant feedback, making instructors more accessible than ever before. And while that’s a great thing, many professors are complaining that some student e-mails are inappropriate.
Overly casual messages bother instructors and affect their perceptions of students’ credibility (Stevens, Houser, & Cowan, 2009). Your message should be formal. It should open with a salutation (“Dear Professor Smith”), continue with a person/class identifier (“I’m Vera Yun in your 9:30 T/R conflict class”), and close with a proper signature (“Thanks in advance, Vera”). The rules of grammar, spelling, and capitalization all apply. There should be a clear subject line that should be appropriate to the content of the e-mail (otherwise, your professor may reject your e-mail as spam).
The e-mail shown here is wholly inappropriate for student-professor correspondence. There’s a halfhearted attempt at an apology and a thinly veiled reference to being hung over on the day of class. Here, as with any communication, it’s important to analyze your audience. There are some things you can say to your friends that you shouldn’t say to your professor. Review your draft before you send it; if you think you’ve written something that you think might offend or be inappropriate, take it out!
Many professors complain that student e-mails are becoming increasingly pushy in tone. Recipients of poor grades send nasty notes, absent students demand teaching notes, and many students send more than ten e-mails a day, expecting their professors to be available around the clock.
Some guidelines: don’t clutter inboxes with a barrage of requests, and give recipients plenty of time to respond. Use the tools that your professor has provided, such as the course syllabus, assignment sheets, or notes posted on a Web site before you e-mail; you may find that you already have what you need. And if you skipped class, don’t ask your professor what you missed; that’s what classmates are for.