How to Email an Instructor
Why You Should Read This
One of the purposes of college education in general - particularly if you are only recently out of high school - is to develop communication skills and habits that will serve you well as you progress forward into further education and working with professional colleagues. Hopefully, you will find yourself with some instructors or professors who are approachable, personable, and perhaps somewhat informal. However, they won't all be that way, and in any case your relationship with a faculty member is fundamentally a professional one. Even when sending email, you should adhere to the sort of style and protocol that is it consistent with that relationship.
Michael Leddy's Advice
high recommended! Read this: How to Email a Professor (This is oriented toward students in humanities courses, but many of the basics apply anywhere.)
My Expectations
I try as hard as possible to treat everyone equally and fairly. However, I will inevitably draw some conclusions about you based upon how you choose to communicate with me - this is especially true if we haven't interacted as much in person.
You can help give a positive impression of yourself when you email me by following some simple steps:
- Begin with an opening, as you would in a letter. "Dear Mr. Schatz" or "Dear Colin" are the best choices. "Dear Instructor" is fine but a bit generic. "Dear Professor" is also fine but technically gives me the wrong title.
- Write in complete sentences, and use standard spelling. You aren't texting a friend on your cell phone. Nothing says "I didn't put much effort into this (even though I want the instructor to take it seriously)" like missing words, informal abbreviations or strings of letters that I can't decipher.
- If you have a question, state it as specifically as possible. Also, you should write your question like a question - at an absolute minimum, that means putting a question mark at the end of the sentence.
- End your message with your name. Besides being a basic courtesy, this lets me know who you are, an essential piece of information missing from a staggering number of the emails I receive. If there is nothing in an email to identify the sender, I assume it is spam.
- If you want me to help with debugging or look at your code, explain what you have already tried and what you do know about the problem so far. Sending an email that just says "Here's my code - can you tell me what's wrong?" suggests to me that you haven't made any effort to figure out the problem yourself. You'll get a much better response if your message looks like this: "My program does/doesn't [description of the problem]. I tried [SPECIFIC things you tried to fix it], but here's what happened...."
