{"id":871,"date":"2014-08-21T14:45:54","date_gmt":"2014-08-21T18:45:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.hargaden.com\/enda\/?p=611"},"modified":"2014-08-21T14:45:54","modified_gmt":"2014-08-21T18:45:54","slug":"tips-for-students-on-how-to-write-an-email","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/tips-for-students-on-how-to-write-an-email\/","title":{"rendered":"Tips for students on how to write an email"},"content":{"rendered":"<ol>\n<li>Check if your question is answered in the syllabus.<\/li>\n<li>Make sure the subject is informative. &#8220;Exam&#8221; is much less useful as a subject line than &#8220;Econ 101 exam conflict&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Start with &#8220;Dear Prof. Jones,&#8221; skip two lines, and begin your first paragraph.<br \/>\nThere is some confusion about the appropriate title (Mr\/Dr\/Prof) to use. Somebody with a PhD can be addressed as &#8220;Dr&#8221;. A professorship is a particular job that comes with the title &#8220;Professor&#8221;. Most, but not all, faculty should be called &#8220;Prof&#8221;. (That is, not all faculty are professors. There are different grades, just like there are Congressmen and Senators.) A quick check of somebody&#8217;s website should indicate whether they&#8217;re a professor or not. If not, it&#8217;s best to play it safe and be over-dressed instead of under-dressed.<br \/>\nIdeally everybody would be just be called by their first name. Unfortunately it doesn&#8217;t work like that. There are plenty of things that would be fine to say to somebody in a pub or on the street that would be very unprofessional to say in a classroom or during office hours. There is a different social dynamic there that professors\/teachers must follow. Similarly, the student should be aware of this dynamic too, and go with &#8220;Dear Prof. Jones&#8221; instead of &#8220;Hi Mike&#8221;.<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t use txt spk <em>ever<\/em>. Typos are fine; asking &#8220;where is ur office?&#8221; is not.<\/li>\n<li>Don&#8217;t use smiley faces.<\/li>\n<li>Use paragraphs.<\/li>\n<li>In your first paragraph, explain why you are emailing, and what you want.<\/li>\n<li>Keep the email short. Almost 100% of emails can remain polite and express their point in two paragraphs.<\/li>\n<li>Sign off with something nice like &#8220;Kind regards&#8221; or &#8220;All the best&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Before you click send, ask yourself &#8220;Am I being reasonable here?&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Check if your question is answered in the syllabus. Make sure the subject is informative. &#8220;Exam&#8221; is much less useful as a subject line than &#8220;Econ 101 exam conflict&#8221;. Start with &#8220;Dear Prof. Jones,&#8221; skip&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-871","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-teaching"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=871"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/871\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hargaden.com\/enda\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}