At many times, and in many ways, reports of the death of e-mail have been greatly exaggerated.
Since the dawn of e-mail, many a self-styled “disruptor” has declared that some other communication mechanism will replace this loathed means of messaging. This disruptor’s pitch will start with a nod-inducing rhetorical question about how much people loathe e-mail. Boldly, this disruptor then proposes to replace it with a professional messaging system that allows people to:
- send messages asynchronously;
- group these messages by topic;
- include a group of specific group of recipients;
- store messages in a queue;
- leaves an easily-retrievable written ‘trail’ of a person’s statements;
- and compose messages offline.
The next time you hear some swashbuckling maverick’s proposal to replace e-mail with, well…e-mail, I want you to let this sink in a bit further: e-mail is here to stay, folks.
E-mail is here to stay, because by and large, it works. It’s also an essential communications tool between professors and students, with or without a pandemic.
One thing that I take very seriously during the semester is my pledge to return any current student’s e-mail inquiry within 24 hours (when I get an update from an alum, or something else that’s non-urgent, I might sit on it for a while longer).
I do my best to live up to it, and I find that students are very respectful of it.
Sometimes, students apologize about writing on a weekend or at an odd time of night. There’s no need to worry about that, though. 24 hours is 24 hours. A student could be in a different time zone, or perhaps on an atypical work schedule. If you write to me at 2:41 a.m. on a Sunday, I won’t even know until I wake up.
I don’t mind whether students thank me. Some e-mails are just short and purely informational, e.g. (“Is Chapter 8 in-scope for our quiz next Tuesday?”), and my quick, factual response doesn’t need a formal expression (or any expression) of gratitude. Of course, acknowledgement is never a bad thing, but students might just see it, and move right along. That’s completely okay — after all, answering that sort of thing is part of my job, and a student might even feel that generating another e-mail isn’t needed at that point (but oh, imagine the infinite loop we could create with thank-yous-to-the-thank-yous).
There is ONE thing, though, that is a total “no-no” in my book. It’s very rare. It happens maybe once a semester, total (for context, one semester for me could involve five separate courses and 150+ unique enrollees). Here’s the scenario:
- Student writes a SERIOUSLY in-depth query. It could have more than a half-dozen separate questions, sometimes in an itemized, bulletized list, and might involve a thorny coding challenge, with a script attached. (This is completely fine, by the way! If you are a student of mine, and you’re reading this, please note that I’m NOT discouraging you from sending this sort of thing). As noted above, answering questions is literally part of my job. Also, answering questions helps me, in a couple ways — it sharpens up my knowledge of the topic, and it prepares me for other questions that are likely to come from other students.
- I write back with a thoughtful, detailed, step-by-step solution to whatever was asked. If it involves code, I might attach another script, or return the original one with corrections. This is not a casual endeavor — putting that answer together involved quite a bit of deliberate time and thought.
- Shortly after student receives this response, he or she fires back with ANOTHER set of equally detailed questions, using a new message & subject line, without ANY acknowledgement of the previous questions or answers.
Everything up until that last part is fine — but the part at the end here truly baffles me.
What was happening on the other end? Am I Siri? Alexa? It would be one thing to just respond to my response, but by beginning a new message, with a new subject line, it almost seems like a conscious effort NOT to acknowledge the time and effort that went into the answer to that first batch of questions. Even something very informal like a “hey, I got your other message” would be more than enough here.
Here’s why this matters: I seriously hope that someone would not do this in a professional setting. Don’t do that to a colleague. Don’t do it to a senior, and don’t do it to a subordinate. People are often glad to help you out, but when you treat them like they’re your personal doormat, that could change.
To recap, I am not saying here that every e-mail needs a response, an acknowledgement, or a “thank you.” To say that would be hypocritical — I know that I’ve let a few e-mails slip through the cracks here and there. Also, there might also be valid reasons why people choose not to send such messages, as they might be trying to avoid inbox “clutter.” Or, perhaps by the time they actually get a chance to sit down and respond, enough time has passed that the matter is sort of “over.”
I am also not saying that there’s anything wrong with sending in-depth queries via e-mail. That’s what it’s there for. Literally, 99%+ of my e-mail interactions with students are completely fine — and it’s important for me to clarify this, because there’s a risk here that someone could skim this a little too quickly and completely miss what I’m really calling out here.
So here’s what I definitely AM saying: If you think there’s anything professional about receiving a personalized, detailed, in-depth response from someone, in a way that specifically answers your particular query, and then immediately launching your “question cannon” again without ANY acknowledgement of the answer that someone just sent you, then you need to rethink that approach. And if no one else ever told you this before, or it just never occurred to you, no worries — I’ll remain professional as I do it, but I’ll make sure to rectify that for you in my response.
GoodWaveData 