My wife is a professor at a fairly large university. Here’s an email she received this morning from one of her students:
That’s a college student there, folks. That individual holds a high school diploma. And yet somehow he doesn’t know
a) how to communicate in his own language
and/or
b) that when you are communicating on a non-personal level (such as from a student to a teacher) you don’t use the same language you would if you were addressing your friends.
Maybe this makes him cool. To me, it makes him look like an idiot. It certainly does to my wife. And maybe it now does to you. I think it should.
Now granted, some may say that you go to college to learn these things, and believe me, my wife is going to try and give him a helpful hand on how to properly represent himself in this arena. But honestly, wouldn’t you think that by high school you’d have an idea that punctuation ends sentences?
I honestly don’t know what would be worse - that this kid doesn’t know how to communicate or doesn’t care.
So anyway, here it is for your approval. Bring on the folks who will tell me that the English language is always changing and so what if he can’t spell a three-letter word, so long as his point gets across and so forth.
You won’t hear me disagree. That’s an embarrassingly poor display of communication skills. Changing language and informality be damned, it’s just common courtesy to make yourself easily understood.
Well, I think one of the big questions I have is, what type of teacher is your wife? I mean, a lot of my teachers were fairly young, and very easy going, so an email like this wouldn’t be all that terrible, although they would get a few quips out of it when sitting alone with their TAs. Also, if the student has a somewhat more personal relationship with your wife (not that kind), the student may feel comfortable being silly with his email responses.
I know in the past, I’ve had plenty of professors who in emails to them about school work would also include a “Here’s a bit about my life” and a bunch of random brain farts as well. Of course, I only did that with professors I knew understood my sense of humor and had enough of a personal relationship with that including aspects of my personal life didn’t seem completely strange.
But, judging from the fact you said your wife now thinks he’s an idiot, I’m assuming that niether of those two cases apply to this guy, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. It’s very unprofessional and absolutely ridiculous. Aside from the professors I mentioned, any other college teacher would most likely completely ignore the students request based off of this email. Ending it with “c ya peace” is almost as bad as abbreviating “tom”. Internet speak is shit, and should never be used when addressing a professor. I just hope your wife doesn’t teach English. If so, make sure this guy repeats the class, because he obviously has a lot to learn.
She does teach English, actually. And this semester is only a few weeks old - he’s got no reason to believe that he’s developed a casual, informal relationship with her. She is very professional wih her students and not one of thse “Hey, I’m your best bud!” teachers.
My girlfriend is also a professor at a major university, and she gets e-mails like this as well. Funny thing is, these are from students who hope to someday write journal articles for the APA.
When I was in grad school, I heard my advisor (a highly respected professor in her field, and not young) take a phone call in her office, in which she first asked who was calling, and then verbally dressed-down the undergrad stranger on the other end for addressing her by her first name. I had to laugh - here I had problems coping with the adjustment of calling the profs in my division by their first names, as I always automatically started to say “Professor so-and-so” for the first couple weeks.
I handled this professor’s E-mail for her while I was there; I’m sure that if I came upon a message like that, her head would have exploded.
Although I would never write in that manner, I can see how it could happen. I am always puzzled when I email my teachers. I never know how formally to write- should I use her first name? Do I use a formal greeting, or is “Hello -----” fine? Am I allowed to joke?
I always err on the side of formaily, but often it is a tough call. I want my teachers to think that I am interested in getting to know them and not just one of those students that hides in class.
True, but I’d apply the same rule of thumb I use now at work. If I know them well enough to judge their personality, I tailor my emails based on that. If I’ve never met them I err on the side of formality and then see how their response is written.
If I were this persons teacher, I would print off that e-mail and return it to this person with an" F–" on it with margin notes and a “I am very disappointed. You can do better”, across the top.
There’s just something about email that makes people decide to throw all the rules of written English out the window. It’s truly bizarre. People abandon capital letters, use puncutation only sporadically, use weird abbreviations, etc.
There’s one man at my company who is very highly-ranked, and yet every single email he writes looks like this:
I just don’t get it, and it drives me nuts.
That said, there are people who do this in email, but write quite well in what they consider “formal” channels-- anything that will be printed, more or less. If it won’t be printed, it doesn’t matter, I guess.
I’m a youngish and fairly easygoing English TA. I get a lot of e-mails like that, including a whole series from a student who decided to plagiarize his final paper. The Honor Court requested that I submit the e-mail exchange as evidence, which I did. Let it suffice to say that his writing style did not influence the court in his favor.
It amazes me that so many students don’t have the sense to act in their own self-interest; do they really think the prof will want to meet with them after an e-mail like that?
Oh well, it’s not quite as bad as the student who kept sending me evangelical Christian spam about how the Evil Atheist Conspiracy, led of course by Madalyn Murray O’Hair, was threatening to cancel “Touched by an Angel.” I was sorely tempted to ask him how I could join the conspiracy, since they clearly had access to some sort of higher truth if they were able to communicate with Ms. O’Hair from beyond the grave. Sigh.
Not to hijack this too terribly far, but what’s with all the commas? I’ve seen this occur again and again from a number of the keyboard-impaired. I can sort of understand “hip” mispellings (dood, kewl), missing puctuation (dont, ive), no caps, etc. I imagine that this is largely due to laziness.
But the commas? Wat the hell purpose do those serve? Are they supposed to be like whitespace? Ellipsis? WTF?
Yes! What the hell is up with the commas? The key’s about 1/8 the size of the space bar! And why, after being able to read and (quasi-) write for more than 30 years, would it occur to anyone that commas are the appropriate separater between words? It just doesn’t make sense, I’ll tell you. It just. Doesn’t. Make. Sense.
I interviewed Tuesday with a guy who loves email. The thing he likes best about email? He doesn’t have to worry about spelling and punctuation “and all that crap”.
If nothing else, people should use punctuation (when they know how) just out of common courtesy. Due to the lack of commas and periods in that email, I read it so fast my head hurts! Sheesh!
Before we are too harsh on this young man, let’s think how the school might learn from his example.
I’m sure students everywhere wouldn’t mind receiving communication like this:
hey wassup this is YOUR UNIVERSITY. sorry to email you so late, hopefully you get a chance to read this before its too late but we were wondering if you could pay next semesters tuition tomorrow Thursday between 2-4 this is the new deadline so hopefully you get a chance to come pay or else no school for U next semester guess well see ya tom if you get this before then c ya peace
It reads like Instant Messenger speak. c ya, and so forth.
I think the “written conversation” aspect of IM makes it easier to ignore lapses in spelling and grammar. Sort of like the difference in delivering a prepared speech, and informal conversation.
It would be interesting to see if he can type in any other styles than this. Are his papers any different, or is all electronic communication the same to him?
Oddly enough, when I was an undergrad at a very relaxed and small college, every professor I ever had asked to be called by their first name. Now, I am a grad student and despite the department’s assertion that we are “junior colleagues” every professor here would be taken extremely aback if I slipped and called them by a first name accidentally. So I had to unlearn informality, the opposite of your experience.