E-mails from your students driving you crazy? The latest “Ms. Mentor” column in the Chronicle of Higher Education offers e-mail etiquette for faculty to teach their students. Read it, pass it on, enforce in your syllabi, and then check out this hilarious thread on the Chronicle forums of “favorite” student e-mails. If that one’s too overwhelming for you (it’s got 546 pages, and counting!), this is also a gem: please answer!!!!!!!!.
Here is the letter to the NYTimes Ethicist:
“I am a tenured professor. My provost asked me to evaluate an overseas colleague. I did so, responding in an e-mail message. The provost then contacted the colleague, quoting my report and attributing it to me. I was stunned: such evaluations are assumed to be confidential. When I complained, the provost replied, “If it’s in an e-mail, it’s public,” adding that our colleague deserves to know what is being said about him and by whom. Your opinion? J.H., NEW YORK”
What do you think? I am surprised that the provost thought that email being the mode of communication, somehow changes the fact that it is still an evaluation. Who is right?
The American Journal of Sociology has published a study by Daniel A. Menchik and Xiaoli Tian on the semiotics of email (h/t contexts). According to the abstract:
E‐mail excludes the multiple nonlinguistic cues and gestures that facilitate face‐to‐face communication. How, then, should interaction in a text‐based context be understood? The authors analyze the problems and solutions experienced by a research panel that communicated over e‐mail and face‐to‐face for 18 months, evaluating both kinds of exchanges alongside survey and interview data. Semiotic and linguistic theory is used to expose essential properties associated with the successful communication of meaning in each context. The authors find that e‐mail requires the cultivation of new techniques for specifically conveying the “pragmatic information” that connects the meaning of words to their users. Such information is assigned in e‐mail through the use of what are termed emphatic, referential, and characterizing semiotic tactics. These tactics are also evident in sustained online interactions studied by other researchers. This theoretical vocabulary represents an alternative to the dominant sociological characterization of e‐mail as an inferior substitute for face‐to‐face interaction.
The full article can be reached here. Thoughts?
A few weekends ago I schlepped to Florida to celebrate my grandmother’s 99th birthday. Being almost a century old, her vision and hearing is just not what it used to be, which makes communicating with others quite difficult for her. However, I was amazed by how much technology is available for her and other seniors (and other visually- and hearing-impaired folks). She had a hearing aid, which is pretty standard, but also a special phone with large numbers and a light that flashes when someone calls in case she doesn’t hear it ring.
The two pieces of technology that really blew me away, however, were a printing device called Presto, and an enlarger. The enlarger looks like a combination TV/overhead projector. If there is something my grandmother wants to read, she places it on the machine, and it appears enlarged on the screen. This enables her to read everything from the directions on prescription bottles, to her favorite philosophical texts, to emails from her grandchildren.
That’s right–my 99 year old grandmother loves email! My grandmother is unable to use a computer, but we can send her emails through the Presto machine, which looks like a regular HP printer. Over the weekend that I visited, daily horoscopes arrived, and several birthday wishes. After the emails are printed, all she has to do is walk them over to her enlarger and boom–she is able to remain connected with friends, family, and the outside world.
The best communication I have with my grandmother, however, is decidedly low-tech. It is face-to-face, looking her directly in the eyes, squeezing her hands, and telling her that I love her. However, because we live a thousand miles away from each other, and the phone has become an impossible barrier, email has to suffice. As soon as I got home from my trip, I sent her an email filled with photographs of our visit.
If you’re reading this blog, you are presumably connected to a computer of some sort – desktop, laptop, BlackBerry Pearl, iPhone 3G (I’m jealous!) But where are you – work, home, in class, in the park, on a train, on the bus, at a restaurant? In today’s world, portable wireless technologies allow us to communicate and connect with each other at any time of day, from virtually anywhere. This sounds wonderful, but is there a potential downside? One of the topics I’m researching is how mobile technologies (e.g., wireless email devices and laptops) are changing the way employees connect and communicate with the workplace, and as a result the distinction between work and non-work time is rapidly becoming blurred. We now have the ability to receive and respond to emails at all times of the day, but do we really want to get an email from our boss at 10pm?
As part of my dissertation, I asked employed workers how often they used laptops and wireless email devices to communicate with work-related colleagues during non-work time. In other words, above and beyond “normal” working hours. I found that, on average, respondents logged on for about 30 minutes before work, 1 – 1.5 hours after work, and 1.5 – 2 hours on their days off. Maybe that doesn’t sound so bad at first … but if you consider a standard five-day workweek, this translates into an additional 10 – 14 hours of additional labor that is being conducted outside of the office. It adds up quickly! Evidence that the 40-hour workweek is a thing of the past.
Dana McCourt, over at Edge of the American West, puts today’s campaign shenanigans into a context that any college teacher would understand:
to: john.mccain@maverickymaverick.gov
from: dmccourt@youhavegottobekiddingme.edu [Sent On Behalf Of American Public]subject: extension?
Dear John,
While I sympathize with the demands of balancing both legislative and campaign issues, I cannot, in accord with historical policy, grant your request for an extension on the debate. Dean’s excuses can only be granted in the cases of health or personal emergencies, and would need to be submitted to me in writing. A physician’s note is also acceptable.
Regards,
Dana McCourt
On Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 12:00pm, John McCain wrote:
sorry to bother you and i know this request is late but i have been really busy and i want to call an emergency meeting with the president and understanding all the material is taking up a lot of my time so i find myself woefully underprepared and i am throwing myself on your mercy. can i get an extension over the weekend on the debate so i can present my best work to you? or should i get a dean’s excuse?
thanks,
john
I came across Janet Malcolm’s interesting review of David Shipley and Will Schwalbe’s book Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home. The title for this post comes from that review: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20571. I haven’t seen the book itself, but, according to Malcolm, the two authors raise a few questions that relate very much not only to our shared (I hope) paranoia of misaddressing an email, but also to the nature of email as a communication practice. To name just a few points the authors make:
1. “On email, people aren’t quite themselves. They are angrier, less sympathetic, less aware, more easily wounded, even more gossipy and duplicitous. Email has a tendency to encourage the lesser angels of our nature” (qtd. in Malcolm).
2. When you accidentally send an email containing negative comments about a person to that very person, do not use email to express your apology. “Just because we have email we shouldn’t use it for everything,” authors suggest.
3. “If you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, a kind of universal default tone won’t automatically be conveyed. Instead, the message written without regard to tone becomes a blank screen onto which the reader projects his own fears, prejudices and anxieties” (qtd. in Malcolm). Malcolm then summarizes the authors’ suggestion to deal with this impersonal aspect of email — ”a program of unrelenting niceness. Keep letting your correspondent know how much you like and respect him, praise and flatter him, constantly demonstrate your puppyish friendliness, and stick in exclamation points (and sometimes even smiling face icons) wherever possible.’”
But exclamation points are really just shortcuts, which we must take because we simply can’t afford to do otherwise with the heavy volume of emails every day, the authors and Malcolm suggest. Does email then propel weak writing? At the end of her review, Malcolm poses a related question about young users of email: “Will their childish babbling evolve into decent writing? Does writing a lot lead to writing well?” My sense is if we write badly and do so often, we may lose or have a hard time acquiring the skills for writing well.
With the tremendous number of electronic mediums for communication, perhaps we take shortcuts much too often, and so do our students. Is there a way to discourage shortcuts or simply bad writing using the very medium that promotes it? Next time I teach composition, I will probably create prompts that would encourage students to correspond via email. Afterwards, in class the sender and the recipient can share their perceptions of the e-mail’s tone. I think this use of a familiar and favorite medium might be a good way to help beginning writers develop a sense of audience, grow more sensitive to their choice of tone, and perhaps become stronger writers, and not just on email.
Readers of Cac.ophony might want to check out either this Salon article, or two of the books it recommends. Scott Rosenberg has reviewed a few email etiquette guides as well as manuals for ‘managing’ ones Inbox. He notes:
Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, By David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, [is] a slender, literate volume that is positioned as a Strunk and White for e-mail. Shipley edits the New York Times Op-Ed page, and Schwalbe is editor in chief of Hyperion Books.
Of the ‘manuals’ he mentions, the one whose approach sounded most useful to me was Mark Frauenfelder’s Rule the Web. He describes it as “a miscellany of mostly free services, tools and tips for managing e-mail and blogs and feeds and photos and music and videos” and discloses that he contributed one paragraph (uncompensated). He also said he learned at least six things from the book, which is not bad considering it’s his job.
I read a review a couple of weeks ago in The New York Times of a book by David Shipley and Will Schwalbe called “Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Home and Office”. It was also discussed in the Talk of the Town section of a recent New Yorker, and I heard one of the authors promoting it on Leonard Lopate one morning. I know a number of people in our communications community have been upset by the quality of emails they receive from students and others, and thought some readers of this blog might want to check out the book. It seems like it relays amusing stories we can all relate to, as well as helpful guidelines.
As if anticipating our symposium, Nick Paumgarten writes on “The Elements of E-Style,” in this week’s New Yorker. He interviews David Shipley and Will Schwalbe, the authors of a modern day Strunk and White: Send: The Essential Guide To Email for Office and Home. This might be good for us all to check out before April 27th!
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