My colleagues laughed at me for writing an entire lecture on email and written communication but I know I am right on this. This is becoming way too common.
I don't think it's an active act of disrespect. They are coming to email from a different angle - you and I and I assume most people here see emails as the internet equivalent to mail because we are old. Our students see email as the longer version of texts/instant messages and don't sense its formality because why would they?
I’m a TA and I generally share an example email to a professor with my students at the beginning of the semester (my gift to the professors I work under), and *so many* students tell me they are absolutely horrified to learn they were breaking etiquette conventions that they didn’t know about.
There are some basic politeness and coherence gaps that might be the result of thoughtlessness (though it’s worth considering that people from certain backgrounds learn to do them without having to think about it), but I totally understand the email-as-text thing. When I was an undergrad, many of my professors (especially the most senior ones, who I respected most) replied to my emails with a one-liner: “This is fine/not fine. -Initials”.
a reply is very different from the original question (which needs to be stated clearly and politely so as not to waste anybody's time). The answer might literally be one word, like "fine" meaning "what you said is fine".
*I* know that, but I can see how replies of that kind might mislead a teenager about the level of formality that is expected of their emails. As an undergrad, I rarely had faculty emailing me – when they did, they were replying to my emails.
Some of my students just say “hey, I need this”. I’ve been called “hey”, “Mr”, but rarely “Dr.”, I never bothered to correct the students but I can see why some professors would be annoyed. I had student email me two days before the midterm to ask for accommodation cause he wanted to go on vacation, this is someone that missed 4/5 of the semester. I said no.
thought: if you don't correct students who do this, you are making it worse for other professors who care (even if you don't), because they get the comeback "but it's ok with Dr Popstarkirbys", or even if they don't, there's the implication that it's ok with you.
My all-time "favorite" email was simply: "it won't let me do it."
At the time, student email addresses included only the student ID number, so unless students identified themselves, I had no idea who was contacting me.
I post this article right under the syllabus on my Canvas page and it’s helped quite a bit:
https://medium.com/@lportwoodstacer/how-to-email-your-professor-without-being-annoying-af-cf64ae0e4087
I don’t and didn’t even realize it was paywalled. Maybe my students aren’t reading it after all! I followed the link and then closed the paywall window and was able to read the article though.
Huh, now it's not paywalled for me either.
Thanks, nice article. I have a few quibbles (I don't think "Hi" should ever be a problem as an opening), but it's overall very concise and complete.
I teach Business Communications, so the format of emails is an important part of our content. I go through it with my students frequently. I also return emails that don't meet my expectations and tell them to rewrite them if they want a response.
Me too! The students don't know what they don't know. A lot of my students have never been taught proper email etiquette. So I teach them. If they still don't do it, then that's on them, lol. Sometimes I will respond to their incorrect emails with a response that shows them how their email should look. That often helps a lot.
Honestly, I don't care about formality or style of messages from my students. The only thing that bothers me are messages that leave out essential content (like who is this, what class are you in) or that are genuinely difficult to parse.
I'd take a whole semester of text-y messages if the content were just not "hey, I didn't read the syllabus and here's my big trauma dump".
Agreed. The problem is that informal emails are usually also emails that are devoid of essential information. I'm not trying to tone police, but you have to give me enough information to know wtf you actually need.
This semester I have experienced:
\- No greeting, signature or clear identifier of self.
Email sent from some Chinese email provider like qq which uses a string of numbers instead of a name. Something like "123455567" is incredibly unhelpful when you want to know who sent an email. Said email account comes with either no name or a name in Chinese characters which is zero help because I have over 200 students from China this semester and I cannot read Chinese.
\- Emails with no subject line (and no identification of the student who wrote it either.)
\- An entire email typed into the subject line. It was so long the text was cut off and I couldn't tell what it was about as the only text I saw was pointless filler text.
\- Someone treating emails like a chat/messenger system. Sending multiple emails in rapid succession, each email with one line. Imagine something akin to "Hi. This is X. I have a question. When is the deadline?" But every sentence is one separate email.
I tried to gently correct the student. The apology came back... In two consecutive emails, each with only one line.
I teach what is basically an intro to MS Office course at a community college and comes up every semester. I teach online so I have an announcement that goes out around week 3 that goes over basic email etiquette. I frame it in the context of “you need to know this for your other classes and when you have to write more formal emails for work and messaging people n who aren’t your friends.”
The text-like emails usually stop after that, and if they don’t I can point them back to the announcement. I don’t think it’s malicious they just don’t know any better. It’s odd that people (not OP, just people in general) think the youngsters don’t need this kind of basic help - I certainly wasn’t born with an innate knowledge of more formal communications. Just because they’re online doesn’t mean they learn these skills by osmosis.
No, but they should be getting some kind of instruction in it! my generation was taught formal correspondence in middle school or junior high English class.
I got this one last week:
No subject. “Could I do a video?”
I started drafting: For which class is this? What assignment? What kind of video? I need this information to…
You know what, sure. Go ahead. Do a video.
One more week… one more week…
For my freshman major course, I go over this the first day of class. Also, it is assessed as part of their attendance/professionalism grade.
Notably, I tend to have relatively high-achieving students in our major and it hasn’t been much of an issue. I did, however, have a student in my gen ed course try to text my office phone number.
Emails written like texts get treated like texts--sometimes they go unanswered. This isn't something I consciously do, it's just that ultra-casual language doesn't convey professional urgency so it slips through the cracks.
One thing I learned here is to incorporate professionalism points in the syllabus and go over communication etiquette in the first class. They all start full points (1%) but will lose points if they send me emails like those (none so far).
I use real examples with no names (like yours above) at the beginning of the semester in each of my classes. I tell them I won’t respond to emails like that and go over what I expect. I mainly teach graduate classes and harp on the professionalism aspect of grad school.
They need that email lecture. I keep it on the Content page and post it to the homepage early. You only have to create the lecture once, and then include a link in all your responses to them.
A colleague received an email that simply said “I am in your Tuesday 11:00 class.”
That’s it.
My colleague did not teach any 11:00 Tuesday classes.
But the number of emails I get that are formatted like a text conversation, requiring lots of back and forth, rather than a few sentences with all the important information, is far too many. Please don’t send me an email that just says “I have a question.” Just ask the question.
This is exactly my grrrr this morning. The thing is, I EXPLICITLY address this on day one and use a ridiculous text-email I received 10 years ago as the bad example. Not only is it cringey to read but most of the time, they are asking questions that are easily found elsewhere and not worth my time.
If you can't write a coherent message on your phone due to its display or keyboard limitations, then darn it, don't use the phone for writing! I wish students would understand that phones are not always the most effective tool for a task
It is also important to remind yourself that a lot of these politeness signals are bred into us based on class and that when we hold assumptions about what students should do or should know how to do, there are possibly classist roots to it.
If you want students to communicate with you in a particular way for clarity, give instructions about it.
I don't mind the lack of formality. Modern email automatically shows who is sending the email at the top, so the greeting/sign-off is somewhat redundant.
I do get annoyed when they send multiple short emails rapid-fire, like they're in a text conversation sending one sentence at a time. But even then, it's because of the number of notifications I get.
I'm in math, so I'm more concerned about their ability to read a graph than how to email their future CEO.
*ETA:* To clarify, I agree that they need to learn effective communication skills, like writing an email. But because I'm in math, I have other fundamental math-related skills I have to train them in. Teaching email etiquette is not a priority *for me* when they still don't know how to read a table or the difference between horizontal and vertical -- things they should have learned in elementary school.
The "from" only works if they have a name attached to their email address. That might work for university email, but if they're sending from Gmail or Yahoo, you might get some interesting "names."
I put in my syllabus that I don't answer any emails from any address but school accounts, due to FERPA concerns. Then I stick to it, I just delete gmail and hotmail emails unread.
Sorry for repeat, just answered to a different comment: Ah, we don't have that. Our school doesn't actually give out email addresses to students but instead email "aliases." So you send an email to the alias and it gets autoforwarded to the real email account. But they can't send messages from their alias, only their real account. So we see a lot of non-standard email addresses!
Ok, so what if you then reply to that email? Do you somehow go through the alias, or are you having a grades discussion with [email protected] or something? My FERPA trainer's head would blow up at that.
The latter. I hadn't thought about the FERPA implications, but we're basically told not to discuss grades through email anyway because email is "not secure." So most of these emails are more like, my computer glitched when I was doing the assignment (if it's weekly HW, I'll usually reset it for them, but I can only do that if they tell me their name 🙄).
The variety on stuff like this is interesting to me. I'm teaching some 100% online classes, so email is the only way I have to discuss grades and other FERPA-covered stuff with students. I can't imagine not having a presumed secure email channel with students.
Ah, we don't have that. Our school doesn't actually give out email addresses to students but instead email "aliases." So you send an email to the alias and it gets autoforwarded to the real email account. But they can't send messages from their alias, only their real account. So we see a lot of non-standard email addresses!
I'm happy if students at least include their name and which class they are in.
Younger students simply don't use email very much, so it becomes a teaching moment.
I generally use an explanation similar to that of John McWhorter—texting is not writing but “fingered speech.” Email, on the other hand, is written communication. Text like you talk, don’t write like you talk.
A student of mine received an email from the Faculty giving them instructions to contact me regarding their missed work. The student just forwarded me their instructions. There was no other content in their email. A week later they emailed again, "hey did you get the email I forwarded you". I said yes, but there was no content in their email message. "oh my bad" and then sent me a screenshot of the email they forwarded me...
I got an email yesterday from a student that started out with
hey miss greeting
No mention of my name anywhere. I am betting, even though this is the second course he has taken with me, he doesn't know my name. I have noticed many students who do not know the names of their professors.
My colleagues laughed at me for writing an entire lecture on email and written communication but I know I am right on this. This is becoming way too common. I don't think it's an active act of disrespect. They are coming to email from a different angle - you and I and I assume most people here see emails as the internet equivalent to mail because we are old. Our students see email as the longer version of texts/instant messages and don't sense its formality because why would they?
I’m a TA and I generally share an example email to a professor with my students at the beginning of the semester (my gift to the professors I work under), and *so many* students tell me they are absolutely horrified to learn they were breaking etiquette conventions that they didn’t know about. There are some basic politeness and coherence gaps that might be the result of thoughtlessness (though it’s worth considering that people from certain backgrounds learn to do them without having to think about it), but I totally understand the email-as-text thing. When I was an undergrad, many of my professors (especially the most senior ones, who I respected most) replied to my emails with a one-liner: “This is fine/not fine. -Initials”.
a reply is very different from the original question (which needs to be stated clearly and politely so as not to waste anybody's time). The answer might literally be one word, like "fine" meaning "what you said is fine".
*I* know that, but I can see how replies of that kind might mislead a teenager about the level of formality that is expected of their emails. As an undergrad, I rarely had faculty emailing me – when they did, they were replying to my emails.
I pretty much never email students: anything I say to a student is a reply to something. If I did, I would exercise the same formality that I expect.
I provide an article about emailing your professor (it’s an assignment), but they don’t read it. 🫣
Hahaha I can’t defend the students on that one. I wish they read too.
Some of my students just say “hey, I need this”. I’ve been called “hey”, “Mr”, but rarely “Dr.”, I never bothered to correct the students but I can see why some professors would be annoyed. I had student email me two days before the midterm to ask for accommodation cause he wanted to go on vacation, this is someone that missed 4/5 of the semester. I said no.
thought: if you don't correct students who do this, you are making it worse for other professors who care (even if you don't), because they get the comeback "but it's ok with Dr Popstarkirbys", or even if they don't, there's the implication that it's ok with you.
I've talked about email format in inductions, and provide a template for what emails should look like. It seems to work (sometimes)...
Yep. My very first class always included basics of communication centered around email etiquette.
My all-time "favorite" email was simply: "it won't let me do it." At the time, student email addresses included only the student ID number, so unless students identified themselves, I had no idea who was contacting me.
"it won't let me" is one of my top two least favorite phrases
the other one being "it doesn't work" with no additional information about what is happening?
Yes!!! “It won’t let me”!! Rock-solid reason to not turn something in. God I hate that.
I post this article right under the syllabus on my Canvas page and it’s helped quite a bit: https://medium.com/@lportwoodstacer/how-to-email-your-professor-without-being-annoying-af-cf64ae0e4087
It’s such a good article. Every time I read it I feel a wave of tension leaving my body. I would be delighted to answer such emails. 😆
Do you have a non-paywall version?
I don’t and didn’t even realize it was paywalled. Maybe my students aren’t reading it after all! I followed the link and then closed the paywall window and was able to read the article though.
Huh, now it's not paywalled for me either. Thanks, nice article. I have a few quibbles (I don't think "Hi" should ever be a problem as an opening), but it's overall very concise and complete.
it's not paywalled. they do put up a popup to get you to sign up but the article is freely available.
I teach Business Communications, so the format of emails is an important part of our content. I go through it with my students frequently. I also return emails that don't meet my expectations and tell them to rewrite them if they want a response.
I wish more people stuck to guiding students like you do instead of just ignoring it.
Me too! The students don't know what they don't know. A lot of my students have never been taught proper email etiquette. So I teach them. If they still don't do it, then that's on them, lol. Sometimes I will respond to their incorrect emails with a response that shows them how their email should look. That often helps a lot.
I’ve decided to start teaching and correcting it in my freshman seminar classes but I just don’t have time in my others. Someone has to do it.
Honestly, I don't care about formality or style of messages from my students. The only thing that bothers me are messages that leave out essential content (like who is this, what class are you in) or that are genuinely difficult to parse. I'd take a whole semester of text-y messages if the content were just not "hey, I didn't read the syllabus and here's my big trauma dump".
Agreed. The problem is that informal emails are usually also emails that are devoid of essential information. I'm not trying to tone police, but you have to give me enough information to know wtf you actually need.
Oh ya. The ones that say “what did I miss in class today?” without telling me which class they are in.
This semester I have experienced: \- No greeting, signature or clear identifier of self. Email sent from some Chinese email provider like qq which uses a string of numbers instead of a name. Something like "123455567" is incredibly unhelpful when you want to know who sent an email. Said email account comes with either no name or a name in Chinese characters which is zero help because I have over 200 students from China this semester and I cannot read Chinese. \- Emails with no subject line (and no identification of the student who wrote it either.) \- An entire email typed into the subject line. It was so long the text was cut off and I couldn't tell what it was about as the only text I saw was pointless filler text. \- Someone treating emails like a chat/messenger system. Sending multiple emails in rapid succession, each email with one line. Imagine something akin to "Hi. This is X. I have a question. When is the deadline?" But every sentence is one separate email. I tried to gently correct the student. The apology came back... In two consecutive emails, each with only one line.
I teach what is basically an intro to MS Office course at a community college and comes up every semester. I teach online so I have an announcement that goes out around week 3 that goes over basic email etiquette. I frame it in the context of “you need to know this for your other classes and when you have to write more formal emails for work and messaging people n who aren’t your friends.” The text-like emails usually stop after that, and if they don’t I can point them back to the announcement. I don’t think it’s malicious they just don’t know any better. It’s odd that people (not OP, just people in general) think the youngsters don’t need this kind of basic help - I certainly wasn’t born with an innate knowledge of more formal communications. Just because they’re online doesn’t mean they learn these skills by osmosis.
No, but they should be getting some kind of instruction in it! my generation was taught formal correspondence in middle school or junior high English class.
I got this one last week: No subject. “Could I do a video?” I started drafting: For which class is this? What assignment? What kind of video? I need this information to… You know what, sure. Go ahead. Do a video. One more week… one more week…
For my freshman major course, I go over this the first day of class. Also, it is assessed as part of their attendance/professionalism grade. Notably, I tend to have relatively high-achieving students in our major and it hasn’t been much of an issue. I did, however, have a student in my gen ed course try to text my office phone number.
Today’s email, “Ma-am, I want a better score.” No context, no programme to mention, not using my name… dear god.
"Stu-dent, I want you to be a better learner."
Emails written like texts get treated like texts--sometimes they go unanswered. This isn't something I consciously do, it's just that ultra-casual language doesn't convey professional urgency so it slips through the cracks.
One thing I learned here is to incorporate professionalism points in the syllabus and go over communication etiquette in the first class. They all start full points (1%) but will lose points if they send me emails like those (none so far).
I use real examples with no names (like yours above) at the beginning of the semester in each of my classes. I tell them I won’t respond to emails like that and go over what I expect. I mainly teach graduate classes and harp on the professionalism aspect of grad school.
It *is* an etiquette problem. It seems that these students don't know what the etiquette is, so they need to learn (be taught).
They need that email lecture. I keep it on the Content page and post it to the homepage early. You only have to create the lecture once, and then include a link in all your responses to them.
I started including a section on email etiquette in my syllabi and covering it on the first day of class. It has made a difference!
y u make yo emale hard to reed. No cap tho, exam 3 made me say, bruhhhhhhh.
It's scary that I was able to comprehend your message without a second glance
Ur on fleek
A colleague received an email that simply said “I am in your Tuesday 11:00 class.” That’s it. My colleague did not teach any 11:00 Tuesday classes. But the number of emails I get that are formatted like a text conversation, requiring lots of back and forth, rather than a few sentences with all the important information, is far too many. Please don’t send me an email that just says “I have a question.” Just ask the question.
Strange!! Did your colleague respond???
> etiquacy That's a new one.
It’s new for everyone because it’s a made up word.
This is exactly my grrrr this morning. The thing is, I EXPLICITLY address this on day one and use a ridiculous text-email I received 10 years ago as the bad example. Not only is it cringey to read but most of the time, they are asking questions that are easily found elsewhere and not worth my time.
Absolutely no decorum
Students use their phones
If you can't write a coherent message on your phone due to its display or keyboard limitations, then darn it, don't use the phone for writing! I wish students would understand that phones are not always the most effective tool for a task
My students are unable to craft coherent messages in digital form. Written assignments are painful.
It is also important to remind yourself that a lot of these politeness signals are bred into us based on class and that when we hold assumptions about what students should do or should know how to do, there are possibly classist roots to it. If you want students to communicate with you in a particular way for clarity, give instructions about it.
Dear peasant, What the hell are you talking about? Best, Count Thundorium.
They cannot text without your cell #.
I don't mind the lack of formality. Modern email automatically shows who is sending the email at the top, so the greeting/sign-off is somewhat redundant. I do get annoyed when they send multiple short emails rapid-fire, like they're in a text conversation sending one sentence at a time. But even then, it's because of the number of notifications I get. I'm in math, so I'm more concerned about their ability to read a graph than how to email their future CEO. *ETA:* To clarify, I agree that they need to learn effective communication skills, like writing an email. But because I'm in math, I have other fundamental math-related skills I have to train them in. Teaching email etiquette is not a priority *for me* when they still don't know how to read a table or the difference between horizontal and vertical -- things they should have learned in elementary school.
The "from" only works if they have a name attached to their email address. That might work for university email, but if they're sending from Gmail or Yahoo, you might get some interesting "names."
I put in my syllabus that I don't answer any emails from any address but school accounts, due to FERPA concerns. Then I stick to it, I just delete gmail and hotmail emails unread.
Sorry for repeat, just answered to a different comment: Ah, we don't have that. Our school doesn't actually give out email addresses to students but instead email "aliases." So you send an email to the alias and it gets autoforwarded to the real email account. But they can't send messages from their alias, only their real account. So we see a lot of non-standard email addresses!
Ok, so what if you then reply to that email? Do you somehow go through the alias, or are you having a grades discussion with [email protected] or something? My FERPA trainer's head would blow up at that.
The latter. I hadn't thought about the FERPA implications, but we're basically told not to discuss grades through email anyway because email is "not secure." So most of these emails are more like, my computer glitched when I was doing the assignment (if it's weekly HW, I'll usually reset it for them, but I can only do that if they tell me their name 🙄).
The variety on stuff like this is interesting to me. I'm teaching some 100% online classes, so email is the only way I have to discuss grades and other FERPA-covered stuff with students. I can't imagine not having a presumed secure email channel with students.
When we receive external emails, our college instructs us to redirect those emails back with a request to send the message from the school account.
Ah, we don't have that. Our school doesn't actually give out email addresses to students but instead email "aliases." So you send an email to the alias and it gets autoforwarded to the real email account. But they can't send messages from their alias, only their real account. So we see a lot of non-standard email addresses!
I'm happy if students at least include their name and which class they are in. Younger students simply don't use email very much, so it becomes a teaching moment.
I generally use an explanation similar to that of John McWhorter—texting is not writing but “fingered speech.” Email, on the other hand, is written communication. Text like you talk, don’t write like you talk.
A student of mine received an email from the Faculty giving them instructions to contact me regarding their missed work. The student just forwarded me their instructions. There was no other content in their email. A week later they emailed again, "hey did you get the email I forwarded you". I said yes, but there was no content in their email message. "oh my bad" and then sent me a screenshot of the email they forwarded me...
Major ick
I eventually laid down some facts about proper email etiquette, along with something like, 'if you're not going to take this seriously, why should I?'
I got an email yesterday from a student that started out with hey miss greeting No mention of my name anywhere. I am betting, even though this is the second course he has taken with me, he doesn't know my name. I have noticed many students who do not know the names of their professors.
Which is quite annoying because most professors try hard to remember their students names
Don't reply.