Students: Write shorter emails

The fall semester is underway at almost all universities now, so this is as good a time as any to give some advice to students. 

Write shorter emails.I gave that away in the post title, so why am I still writing? Because I want to try to explain why I give this advice.

Friends, your profs get a emails. A lot of emails. A great heaping buttload of emails. We get them from chairs, we get them from deans, we get emails from chair who are forwarding the dean’s emails, we get them from funding agencies that we have never applied to a grant from, we get them from almost every administrative office on campus, we get them from journals, and we get them from students.

I don’t think it’s easy to understand how much of a professor’s life revolves around emails. It is the default mode of communication for universities.

I think for many students, their typical mode of communication is through their phone, either by text or social media. Email? That’s for old people. 

But a lot of professors are old people. And even for new professors who might prefer to communicate with their phones, they are more or less forced to work with emails.

To make things worse, we profs are usually forced into using byzantine forms of email because of “security.” There’s a huge difference between using my personal Gmail account (say) and my university *.edu email account. 

I can open up my Gmail app on my phone and just... read my emails. 

My institutional account, my email might take over my phone login and force me to use a “more secure” method (using a PIN instead of an unlock pattern, say), force me to use two factor authentication every time I want to read an email, or force me to install an “Authenticator” app that requires entering my PIN, approving a request, entering my PIN again before I can read my emails.

So, students, trust me when I say this.

Writing shorter emails is one of the simplest things you can do to make your professor’s life easier. 

Look, I get that you, as a student, don’t want to seem rude. You might think that anything less than three carefully composed paragraphs is some sort of slight or that you won’t be taken seriously. 

Just tell us what you want. Need an extension? Just say, “Can I have an extension for this assignment.” You don’t need to detail that you need an extension because you were out with a friend and ordered coffee but it was way hotter than you expected and you burnt your tongue and went to an emergency room to see if there was anything they could do. If we need more information, we’ll ask for it.

Also? This is why, when you write one of those three paragraph emails to a professor, you might only get a “Sure. - ZF” or a sentence back.