How to email a Professor

Email has become a democratizing system of communication that flattens hierarchies and allows people of different status to communicate with each other.

Most professors value receiving email from their students. But some professors are shocked by the sheer effrontery of some students’ email messages. And hardly any professors want to read email messages from their students that resemble texting or IM.

These guidelines, and the above introduction, are culled from recommendations provided by several universities, a list of which appears at the end.

  1. Use your university email account. Most professors receive hordes of spam mail, as a result of their university email addresses being widely available. Ergo, most professors use vigorous spam detectors. Don’t run the risk of your important email message ending up in your professor’s spam folder because it was sent from your bigeyes@yahoo account.
  2. Use your professor’s LAST NAME in your salutation. How students address their professors matters deeply to most professors. In a large survey, professors reported their highest preference is to be addressed in email as Professor LastName (e.g., Professor Lee). Professors report deeply disliking being addressed in email as only “Professor” without their last name, as in “Hi Professor” (just as you might dislike being addressed in a personal email as “Hi Student”). Professors also dislike being addressed as “Hey Prof.” That’s general advice for contacting professors—but see below (highlighted) for how I would like you to address me, in this course.
  3. Start a new message unless your current message is on the same topic as a previous message. Avoid simply replying to an old message that your instructor previously sent, unless your correspondence is on the same topic as the previous message (i.e., don’t reply to a message about the Course Syllabus unless you are emailing about the course syllabus). Although it might be convenient for you to quickly grab a message from your inbox and reply to it, replying to a previous message tells the recipient you are corresponding about the previous topic.
  4. Write an informative subject heading. If your professor has instructed you to use a particular subject heading whenever you email regarding a particular class or a particular assignment, use that subject heading. If your professor hasn’t instructed you to use a particular subject heading, write the course number of the course you are writing about in the subject heading. Do not use a generic subject heading, such as “Question,” or a slang subject heading, such as “Hey.”
  5. Do not address a professor by their first name unless they have explicitly instructed you to do so. Some professors may tell you to call them their first names. If so, writing an email to them in which you address them by their first name (e.g., Dear Roberto) is fine. But do not address a professor by their first name unless they have explicitly told you that is ok (even if you hear a Teaching Assistant [TA] address the professor by their first name. A TA has a different relationship with a professor than you, a student, has with a professor). The recommendation to not address a professor by their first name, unless they have explicitly instructed you to, also holds for in-person communication.
    • I—Joel—am explicitly instructing you to address me as Joel (and not Dr. Suss or Professor Suss).
  6. Write grammatically, spell correctly, and use appropriate capitalization. Show your professor that you care about how you present yourself by writing well-formed email messages to them. Capitalize properly, use a spell checker, and proofread for grammatical errors.
  7. Use paragraph breaks to help organize your message. No one likes to read a long block of words on a screen. A good rule of thumb is no more than three or four sentences per paragraph.
  8. Don’t use e-mail to rant or whine. Ranting and whining messages are no fun for anyone to read. Therefore, and not surprisingly, most ranting or whining emails elicit the exact opposite effect than the effect you want the email to elicit. We’re all tempted to rant sometimes, so what one professor recommends is to rant all you want in an email. But don’t send that email. Hit the delete button, and then write a more measured message.
  9. Write the body of the email message first; fill in the address in the TO: line last. To guard against sending a typo-ridden, ranting, or simply incomplete email message, write the body of your email message first. Read it over at least once if not twice. If it looks ok, then fill in the address in the TO: line and send.

REFERENCES

Dr Who or Professor Who? On Academic Email Etiquette. Tom Hartley, ThermalToy.

Email Etiquette: How to Write Email to Your Professors. University of La Verne Learning Enhancement Center.

How to Use Proper Email Etiquette When Writing to a Professor. University of

Delaware.

Netiquette Guidelines. Wellesley College Project on Social Computing.