Collegiate Times

Students often e-mail their professors and don?t think twice about the message they are sending. Unbeknownst to most, there are guidelines to use when e-mailing someone like a professor or a potential boss or even friends. Matt Giglio, a Virginia Tech communications skills instructor, teaches his students how to send professional e-mails. ?I don't have a template or anything that I ask them to use, but I do stress that students should address me, as well as their other professors, in a professional manner in their e-mails. I stress that the e-mails to professors should definitely be more formal than e-mails to their friends. For example, there is an electronic shorthand that has developed such as abbreviating the word "your" to "ur" or "to" into "2" (as in I'll be late 2 ur class today). I tell my students that how they construct their messages influences how they're perceived by the reader, so if students don't take their e-mail messages seriously, neither will their professors.?

He also states that many of his students tend to err on the friendly side as opposed to the professional side when they e-mail him at the beginning of the semester. Giglio and all the other communications skills instructors all address in class the difference between casual and formal e-mails. He also offered an e-mail tip for students; ?One thing students should do is change their e-mail settings so that when they send a message, their name appears in the receiver's inbox rather than their PID. If I receive an e-mail with a student's name in the "From Box," I know immediately who it is as opposed to having to decipher a PID, which can often be a cryptic or random string of letters.?

Aileen Murphy, creative writing instructor, uses e-mail as an integral part of her classes. ?I have not stipulated a particular format, although the nature of my course requires that students send poetry and fiction as attachments, and these pieces go to everyone else in the class. This means that they must clarify by properly labeling their work so as to avoid chaos. If a student makes the mistake of being way too familiar or way too informal, enough to make me uncomfortable--to make me question the idea of respect, then I will write back to that student and ask him or her to change the way he or she has addressed me and the class.?

When asked what students do right and wrong concerning e-mailing their professors, Murphy responded, ?The main thing students do "wrong" is when they miss class and then shoot an e-mail to the instructor asking if they missed anything "important." I know that students feel that they are being responsible for asking this. However, they also need to know that this question is insulting to teachers. It implies that parts of our classes are "unimportant" and right or wrong; it is not wise for a student to suggest this possibility. The main thing students do "right" as far as my classes are concerned, is when they write focused, organized, and clear messages, whether asking a question or delivering information that I requested.?

Murphy also had one more thing to say about the importance of e-mail and how it affects college students; ?Email has changed our ways of teaching, as it expands the classroom to be a 24 hour way of communication. There are those teachers who specifically do not check their email at home, because they feel they are "off duty" and need to define the parameters. Many students believe that they can make up for any ills by writing an email, sending work in late, etc. That is not always the case, of course. This semester, I have two students who are currently soldiers in Iraq. They are Tech students who want to get on with their education even before they get back home. Our dependency on email to send them information and to receive their questions, homework and their writing is more important than ever. This opportunity would have been impossible without the availability of email.?

For more tips on e-mail etiquette, check out www.netmanners.com.