Favorite student emails

[downer]

Obviously there are cultural differences. In the South, you have to chat for 10 minutes before getting to the point. Some Northerners have told me they grew to like it. Personally, I can do without it. When dealing with peers, it's good to be nice. And there are some people I like.

However, with my class, it's my rules. I like taking it to bare functionality, for the most part.

I do mostly express some sort of sympathy when students say they are dealing with hard issues in their lives.

[mythbuster]

I work in the deep South, but I'm from the West and married to a New Yorker. I have had to train myself to add these fluff sentences to all student emails. Why? Otherwise I get reamed about being unapproachable and overly blunt and critical in student evals.  Actually even our office staff have commented on how "straight to the point" I am.

So yes, it's definitely still a cultural/ regional thing.

[Aster]

Stu Dent:
"Professor, can the quizzes be set for extra time? I feel that there is not enough time for me to read and comprehend the questions, and that I'm just guessing on too many answers."

So I checked the student's latest quiz. She completed the quiz in *half* the time allocated for her, and got every question right except for one.

I am at a loss for words.

[apl68]

"Please get back to me at your earliest convenience."

To explain why you got the grade you did? When I already filled out the grading rubric.

I need to bring out my list of priorities, and show where you fall on it.

Students think they are being polite, but these sort of "I eagerly anticipate your reply" phrases make professors feel annoyed and stab-y.

Goodness, yes. On the one hand, these are sort of meaningless formulas that the students are practicing deploying as part of their professional correpondance toolkit, but on the other hand the meaning isn't entirely gone, and what remains of it is a frustratingly impatient demand to hurry up.

It's basically the same thing that happens when students think they are writing impressively in essays but use bizarre or archaic formulations that sound silly. There might have been a time when "I eagerly anticipate your reply" sounded polite, but for whatever reason most people do interpret it as pushy now. You can see how "respond to me at your earliest convenience" once was actually a way of saying that while you really wanted to hear back from the person, you understood they might be busy and not able to respond right away. Now it sounds demanding, probably because of changes in how we think of time and correspondence or something.

Maybe for our own amusement we should start encouraging ever more archaic closing phrases--"I remain your humble servant" etc.

I think that's "Yr Obt Svt."

[apl68]

I work in the deep South, but I'm from the West and married to a New Yorker. I have had to train myself to add these fluff sentences to all student emails. Why? Otherwise I get reamed about being unapproachable and overly blunt and critical in student evals.  Actually even our office staff have commented on how "straight to the point" I am.

So yes, it's definitely still a cultural/ regional thing.

We used to have a staff member who ran into that sometimes.  She was from the Great Lakes, and, despite having now spent more than half her life living in this region, still has a pronounced regional accent.  I never found her less than polite, but now and then a patron thought she was being too abrupt and unapproachable. 

She once told me that her son, who was only a boy when they moved here, adjusted to speaking with a local accent virtually overnight.  As an adult he moved away to still another part of the country.  When he returns on a visit, he no longer sounds much like he's from around here. 

[Anon1787]

"Your most humble and obedient servant" is the older version of "Your student-centered facilitator of student success."

[kaysixteen]

What mamselle says is true, of course, but, really, what part of 'don't give an order to a professor' don't these kids get?   I largely despair of a return to 1950s-style, or heck, 1980s-style, appropriate student deference to their elders.

[smallcleanrat]

What mamselle says is true, of course, but, really, what part of 'don't give an order to a professor' don't these kids get?   I largely despair of a return to 1950s-style, or heck, 1980s-style, appropriate student deference to their elders.

I think part of the issue is that boilerplate phrases like "I eagerly await your reply" or "please respond at your earliest convenience" are NOT phrased as direct orders. The order or expectation is implied, and students may not realize this.

They may think the message they are conveying is "I'd be very grateful for your response" or that, at most, they are making a polite request.

Contrast with, "Get back to me ASAP!"

[jerseyjay]

In my historical research, I read quite a bit of correspondence from the 1890s-1930s. This correspondence has its own protocol (I think it used to be taught in school) and people understood what it mean. It was couched in politeness, but people knew what it meant. ("At your earliest convenience" was always understood to mean, as soon as possible; "at your convenience" meant when it suited you.)

I wouldn't expect students today to understand this, any more than I would expect them to know that "cc" stands for "carbon copy," much less how to use a carbon copy.

I do think that a level of politeness is useful. Just last week I was included in an email exchange in which a student called the dean of students incompetent, stupid, and mean. I don't know the dean of students well enough to comment on this, but the fact that the student seemed neither able to relay their anger in a polite way nor felt any compunction for being so rude to somebody in authority was striking. In the 1920s, it was very possible to write a letter that was both polite and trenchant. Students (and many others) seem to have lost this ability to do this. Which is one of the reasons that many people from outside of the US think Americans are often simple-minded.

[smallcleanrat]

In my historical research, I read quite a bit of correspondence from the 1890s-1930s. This correspondence has its own protocol (I think it used to be taught in school) and people understood what it mean. It was couched in politeness, but people knew what it meant. ("At your earliest convenience" was always understood to mean, as soon as possible; "at your convenience" meant when it suited you.)

I wouldn't expect students today to understand this, any more than I would expect them to know that "cc" stands for "carbon copy," much less how to use a carbon copy.

I do think that a level of politeness is useful. Just last week I was included in an email exchange in which a student called the dean of students incompetent, stupid, and mean. I don't know the dean of students well enough to comment on this, but the fact that the student seemed neither able to relay their anger in a polite way nor felt any compunction for being so rude to somebody in authority was striking. In the 1920s, it was very possible to write a letter that was both polite and trenchant. Students (and many others) seem to have lost this ability to do this. Which is one of the reasons that many people from outside of the US think Americans are often simple-minded.

Around which decade(s) would you judge this style of "polite and trenchant" noticeably dropped off?

[kaysixteen]

WRT 18yos, whom I do love teaching, a la 'sage on the stage', nonetheless I am like Gen. Zod: I do not take orders-- I give them.  (Phrased tactfully, of course).

[Caracal]

At a couple of schools I teach at, students often start out their messages with "I hope you are doing well." or they finish with "Thank you very much and have a great day." Maybe some email programs have auto-suggested sentences.

I try to quietly discourage such politeness. I emphasize my preference for keeping things simple.

I have to say I don't understand this logic.

"Such politeness" in this case means a polite salutation and a polite conclusion. Having these makes the email less abrupt and, well, polite. An email that gets straight to the point is rude without some form of greeting. Rather than simple, I would say it is simple-minded. I would never write a colleague without a polite opening and conclusion, and I would be ill-disposed to anybody who wrote to me without such. (Of course, in an email chain, such politeness  tends to cease in the back and forth, bur for an initial email, it seems useful.)

In Latin America, I was taught that it is rude to actually get to the point in less than two or three paragraphs of fluff. That is both obsolete and too much. But without some politeness, an email is rude.

Yeah, I guess I tend to only dispense with this stuff when I'm granting a request. If a student asks me for an extension, I might just write "sure, that's fine." I guess it feels like because I'm granting the request, I don't need to worry about coming off as rude or abrupt. The same response when a student said they couldn't come to class because they were sick would feel dismissive.

[arcturus]

I try to model correct professional communications, which includes a salutation, closing signature, and use of standard English spelling and grammar in the main body. One of my objections to my school sending email in my name (see posts last fall about the school sending all students email in my name after I filled out the required early evaluation form...) was that it did not have this professional format. Particularly in this day of text-speak, I think it is important for students to see examples of how they will need to communicate when they get out "into the real world."

[kiana]

Yeah, I guess I tend to only dispense with this stuff when I'm granting a request. If a student asks me for an extension, I might just write "sure, that's fine." I guess it feels like because I'm granting the request, I don't need to worry about coming off as rude or abrupt. The same response when a student said they couldn't come to class because they were sick would feel dismissive.

I will also dispense with it when we are engaging in a conversation via email -- this happens quite a bit when students email me asking for help on a problem and I don't want to just tell them the answer. If it's the 2nd, 3rd, etc. email in the same conversation within a few hours span it seems redundant.

[Puget]

Yeah, I guess I tend to only dispense with this stuff when I'm granting a request. If a student asks me for an extension, I might just write "sure, that's fine." I guess it feels like because I'm granting the request, I don't need to worry about coming off as rude or abrupt. The same response when a student said they couldn't come to class because they were sick would feel dismissive.

I will also dispense with it when we are engaging in a conversation via email -- this happens quite a bit when students email me asking for help on a problem and I don't want to just tell them the answer. If it's the 2nd, 3rd, etc. email in the same conversation within a few hours span it seems redundant.

Yes, just like we don't great each other repeatedly within a conversation it would be odd to do so in a string of emails that continue a conversation.
Students sometimes go too formal as well in odd ways-- I had one student who started every email by saying "Hi, this is X from your Y class" even though after months I clearly knew who he was.