Sending e-mails and basic academic politeness

Jeff Leek had an excellent blog post from 2011 on getting e-mails responses from busy people, which seems to have disappeared recently. While his recommendations are quite strict, they are a good idea of general guidelines university students should pick up when trying to communicate with most academics, who are almost always busy people. Here is my expanded version of those rules:

• RULE 1. Limit the number of e-mails you send to that person, ideally to one a day. This is obviously a soft rule - and if you worked with someone on multiple projects, and you needed to update them on both, then sending one e-mail per project makes complete sense. However, e-mails are not for chit chat.
• RULE 2. Limit the size of the e-mails to at most 3 sentences (preferably shorter). While this might sound extreme, 3 sentences can convey a lot, and that’s not counting the standard greetings. There is a difference between short and curt.
• RULE 3. Limit the format of questions to a yes/no answer as much as possible. More generally, it’s more about limiting the set of responses. It could be yes/no or it could be something else. You want to pre-chew as much of the work as possible so that you can get a swift answer. Think about what kind of feedback you really need - it takes me about a minute to read a piece of text and answer good/needs improvement/needs major rewriting, but it takes me multiple hours to produce a nuanced response. And I do not have multiple hours. Therefore you are left with the choice between a simple response today or a nuanced one next week (at least!).
• RULE 4. In case of time sensitive issues, state a default action and a date/time at which you will take that action unless advised otherwise. For example, “I will fix the grammar and send the report as is on Monday at 8 AM unless there is an issue”. Make sure to use reasonable deadlines and some common sense here to not appear rude.
• RULE 5. Be as specific as possible in your requests (without going over in length). More specifically, don’t email someone to ask them if you can e-mail them to ask a question. Just e-mail the question. A consequence of this rule: drop the obsequious noise, and state what you want clearly and simply. Don’t write “I was wondering if you might be ok allowing me the opportunity to ask you a question about…” - just write the question itself.
• RULE 6. Make sure your e-mail contains keywords that make it easy to search for them later. Even better if they are in the subject line. I cannot emphasise how bad most e-mail clients are - this is for your own good more than anything else.

Basic politeness and standard greetings

Now that this is said, the second thing is basic politeness. It’s a cultural feature so different rules might apply in different places, but while there are many correct ways of addressing academic staff as a student (some people prefer first name, some people prefer Dr. Lastname, some people prefer Professor, etc.) there are also very incorrect ways of doing it.

• “Dr. Firstname” makes it sound like you are addressing a TV personality.
• Nicknames, unless the lecturer has told you that’s what they go by.
• “Dude”/“bro” (actually seen in e-mails) is probably not a good idea.

That also means that you need to add some standard greetings in your e-mail. Just because you have to be short does not mean you should be rude. People who have e-mailed me know that I use the same e-mail structure and greetings in all cases and occasions:

> Dear X,
> (e-mail content)
> Kind regards,
> Jeremie

No need to be grandiloquent. Simple, basic and respectful greetings get the job done, don’t waste time and space, and work in most cases.