Email Etiquette for Contemporary Academics

In academic jobs, among the hundred things you need to do daily, reading and responding to emails is a chore you cannot escape. Nobody sends you a work email to make your life easy. They always want you to do something. The emails tell you to turn in a report that was due a week ago, hand in grades that must be submitted today and write a recommendation letter that must be uploaded by tomorrow morning.

While I don’t have any tips to end email-induced suffering, we can alleviate our aggravation if we follow a few simple rules when sending emails to our colleagues and students.

Don’t click Reply All. (It is unnecessary and annoying.) Except for a few situations where every other member of your group needs to know what you are saying, don’t click Reply All when you are responding to a group email. You need to reply to everyone only when you are a member of a Committee on Faculty Productivity or a Committee on Committees or some other committee tasked with finding a solution to a problem that doesn’t yet exist. Other than that, just hit Reply, which will send the email to the relevant person. When you receive an email announcing a faculty colleague’s latest accomplishment, I know you are eager to appear collegial and congratulate that person, but all your colleagues don’t need to know how generous you are with your compliments.

Also, don’t tell us that you cannot make the Friday meeting because you have to take your parrot to a speech therapist. Nobody cares. It may seem like a small thing and signify nothing to you, the sender. But it can ignite sound and fury in the recipient. I have witnessed people using Reply All to express outrage at a person who used Reply All.

Keep it short (or face TLDR). When you write an email, get straight to the point. If you do need to give some background, state the main reason for the email up front and then give the additional information. The text in the body of the email should be as concise as possible. In most cases, it should be possible to convey the message in three short paragraphs. Please remember that nobody wants to read an epic about a broken projector in the classroom.

If you write an overly long email, it will elicit the response “Too long, didn’t read,” or TLDR. I don’t read any email that resembles Moby Dick in length. Let’s imagine you are Ahab, and in this version, you survive the whaling trip and are dying to tell your colleagues about your ordeal in an email. You can just say the following: “I spotted a white whale and missed harpooning it. The damn thing bit off my leg. Then I went after it with all I had. A lot of things happened along the way, and my graduate student Ishmael has put together a detailed narrative which you can read in the attached PDF. --C. Ahab, professor of cetology.”

All kidding aside, if you think you must include a long text -- anything longer than three paragraphs -- use bullet points. Make the key points stand out. Bold, italicize, underline. Do whatever you have to do to draw the reader’s attention while keeping everything professional and not resorting to any silly gimmicks.

Include a subject line. (Hint: It’s about the subject of the email.) It is maddening when people either don’t use the subject line at all so the email pops up with a meaningless “re:,” or they repurpose a previously sent email with a subject line that has nothing to do with the subject of the present email. The recycling of a subject line usually happens when people want to send an email to a group.

The subject line has to be about the subject. In other words, it has to say what the email is about. Don’t reuse “Toilet closure” to invite colleagues for dinner with a visiting professor.

You may not be tech savvy enough to figure out how to save email addresses of a group, or you may take pride in being a Luddite. But it doesn’t take a computer genius to change the subject line if you are going to use a previously sent group email.

Don’t rant (or you will repent later). I know sometimes you get extremely upset with a colleague, the department chair, the dean or whomever. But take a deep breath and get away from any computer/device that can send an email. If you do write an email in the heat of the moment, you will regret it later. Embarrassment would be the least harmful of possible consequences. Your reputation and sometimes your career might be in jeopardy. Emails are treated as documents, just like words written with pen and paper. They can be used as evidence in a court of law.

Sometimes people build up so much resentment against someone in their college or university that they let it out in an email because it’s hard for them to confront that person. In my career, I have seen a few examples of that. You may also be a recipient of a rant. If an email with some kind of outburst gets to your inbox, just ignore it. Or if it is necessary to deal with it, do it in person. You will be surprised how restrained people are when they have to talk to you face-to-face.

Don’t click that link. (No good can come of it.) Among all the emails from obscure journals soliciting your research articles and those offering invitations to chair a prestigious conference you’ve never heard of, you will receive phishing emails. It is a portmanteau created by combining “fishing” and “phreaking.” The second anachronistic word means “gaining illegal access to the telephone system.” The emails look like they are coming from your IT department or the department chair, dean or president. Some are easy to spot because the text, which is seemingly from the dean, is asking for a gift card. The others look almost authentic. But if you pay close attention to the wording, they tend to be generic.

Some phishing emails have a link for the reader to click. These tend to be harmful not just for you but also for the whole institution. If a gullible person anywhere on the institution’s computer network clicks the link, then the criminals use this to gain access to the network and introduce ransomware. This type of computer virus “infects” the computers and encrypts the data. Then the data on all these computers are held for ransom, which the institution is supposed to pay. But the institutions don’t give money to criminals, and many people end up losing the data stored in their computers. Previously, ransomware used to be a headache for mainly big corporations. Lately, the menace has entered academic spheres.

The simplest way to prevent this from happening is to control your impulse to click on any link sent in an email, especially if it comes from outside your institution. These days many organizations flag external emails. If you pause for a second and look to make sure the email is coming from someone in your university or an outside entity you trust, then it would be safe to click on the link.

Beware of artificial stupidity (aka “smart” features based on artificial intelligence). By now, the overzealous virtual assistant in your email program has annoyed you at least once, if not many times. Usually, it will autocorrect someone’s name to include a wrong spelling (which will make you apologize to the recipient) or place words containing every email cliché in your sentence the moment you type the first word.

While quite irritating, they are simply annoyances and not that harmful. But some “smart” features can, in fact, wreak havoc in your life -- as I learned the hard way. Lately, I have been writing notes on my smartphone and emailing them to myself as an additional backup to cloud storage. One such note contained my private thoughts about a meeting with a university administrator. Unbeknownst to me, my Gmail cc’d my note to that administrator based on its content. By the time I discovered that, several hours had passed, and I was unable to recall the email, so I had to write a contrite note of explanation to the administrator. All was well in the end, but the extent of intrusion into my private life was appalling. I felt violated.

It’s good to keep in mind that while Silicon Valley mavens are deriving orgasmic pleasure in proclaiming the virtues of AI, the best current AI has an IQ of a 6-year-old. (By the way, AI is good at recognizing patterns. I am not disputing that.) So if you trust the smart features of your email program, you will be entrusting your highly sophisticated communication to a little child lacking judgment.

These are a few key guidelines that have helped me preserve my sanity in an email world. I’m hoping that if you follow my advice, your emailing will be more efficient than before, and you’ll even be able to sign up for that committee you’ve been itching to join.