How to Email Your Prof or TA

NOTE: The style of communication I’m about to describe is culturally specific: Western, white, upper-middle class, Anglo-Saxon. Not every professor or TA will feel comfortable with this culture. It’s OK if you don’t either! It’s also OK if you choose not to use these tips because this style would make you feel erased (and/or colonized), and it’s not OK that, in general, this culture is disproportionately represented in academia. What I’m offering here is a hammer in case it’s useful to you to know how to nail stuff together, while acknowledging that the way the power structures of academia force everyone to be carpenters is oppressive.

For someone who teaches applied professional communication skills at the university level, I was terrible at writing emails as a university student.

The reason? A bit because I was still figuring out who I was and gaining the adult confidence to ask for what I wanted. But also, because even though I was a strong writer, I didn’t know the genre conventions of (culturally specific) business email.

Now that I’ve learned about this style of business writing and received literally hundreds of emails from students, I cringe to think of how ineffective my own attempts were.*

You can get more helpful responses more quickly, and here’s how. Just remember these 8 things:

1. Answering your email is part of my job.

You don’t need to apologize for emailing me. I know it may seem like I have a ton of More Important Professorial things to do, but actually, responding to students like you is both literally part of my job and very important to me. If I do happen to be doing something even more important? I just won’t be checking my email.

No, that doesn’t mean that I never get annoyed to receive a particular question, but it’s still my responsibility to set my own boundaries. If you do your best to address me like a fellow human being and understand that my answer may be “no,” it’s OK to ask for what you need. You don’t need to apologize for asking either — you deserve to advocate for your wants and needs.

2. I like you, but I am not your friend.

Going back to that point about my answer being “no”: sometimes, I can’t help you. I don’t think worse of you for asking, unless you are purposefully and maliciously attempting to break the school rules. I usually wish I could help! I probably agonize over it!

But just because I like you as a person doesn’t mean we have a friendship relationship. I’m your instructor, and I have responsibilities toward you, your classmates, and my employer that I can’t abandon just because doing so would make us both feel better in the short term. I want you to learn, practice, and master the material I teach. That’s what you pay the school for and why the school in turn pays me.

3. I like you, but I also like a lot of other students.

Again, although I probably like you, I also like a lot of other students. I like all the students I teach, except the few who behave cruelly to others or whom I just never actually meet because they don’t attend class.

That means, if you want a quick response, I need you to specify the class and section you’re in. You don’t need to re-introduce yourself and tell me your name, but I do need to know which set of course documents to look at. Again, it’s not because I don’t recognize you or care about you — it’s because I teach multiple sections of the same course, sometimes in the same classroom on different days of the week, and there’s only so much my memory can do.

4. I can’t read your mind.

I don’t know what you want. Please tell me.

For example, I know you think you’re being direct by telling me about your problem, but I don’t know what solution you have in mind. Precision is key — sure, I can give you a 24-hour extension on that one thing but not a week-long extension, and if you just say “extension,” we’ll have to go back-and-forth again on how long etc. Save both of us some time — especially since it’s time you might spend worrying — and be precise from the start.

5. I also can’t help you read your mind.

If you don’t know what you want, stop and think about it before you email me.

Believe me, as someone who once emailed a TA in a panic after a final exam to ramble about the question I thought I’d got wrong and how actually I did know the answer even though it literally would affect my mark not at all… I get it. Some emails aren’t about you wanting something from me, they’re about you expressing something to me. You just want to be heard and understood.

That’s OK, if that’s all you want and you know it. So consider a moment: in an ideal world, what would my reply to your email be? Sympathetic words? Reassurance that I do care? An offer to do _______? Permission for ______? If you don’t know, I won’t know how to respond to you either.

6. I am reading your email on my phone on the subway.

I am not Indiana Jones, running around having hair-raising adventures that lead me to neglect my actual job. But I’m also not sitting in my oak-lined study with baroque violin music playing gently in the background, able to devote my full 100% attention to your email immediately.

A lot of the time, I will get your email while running an errand or commuting or teaching a different class. If you want a fast answer, keep your message clear, brief, and easy to respond to. Do this by asking me for something specific (see above) and leaving out stuff I don’t need to know, such as preambles.

Remember that my notification shows me the subject line and first line of your message — if you can clearly convey what you want in the first sentence, I’m much more likely to be able to respond quickly from my phone.

7. I have a life outside the university.

I keep normal business hours. Sometimes, if you’re lucky and need only a short response, I can dash off a few words almost as soon as I receive your message. Or maybe I just happen to be at my computer already.

But in general, assume it will take me up to three business days to respond. See #1: when I am working on other things or spending quality time with my family and friends, I literally turn off my email client. I understand emergencies and will do my very best to support you through them, but the corollary is that lack of planning is not an emergency.

If you save your work until the hour before deadline (perfectly OK! Maybe that’s what works for you!) and have to email me a question right before the assignment is due, I won’t purposely delay answering you to tEaCh YoU a LeSsOn, but I also won’t change my teaching/work/sleep routine to keep checking my inbox in case someone might have a last-minute question.

Also note: according to university policy (at least at my workplace, backed up by provincial law), we can go back and fix grades retroactively if it turns out you had a situation that requires accommodation. So it’s OK if you have a crisis whose severity prevents us from working out accommodation by the deadline — we have the rest of semester (and beyond!) to figure out how to deal with it.**

8. I don’t hate you if you ask me something you could look up on your own.

If I reply to your email telling you to look up the answer in the syllabus or the assignment guidelines, I’m not secretly thinking you’re an idiot or a bad person. I’m thinking that you’ve maybe got a lot on your plate and/or encountered instructors who didn’t go by the information in their handouts and/or you are the kind of person who wants answers from a person and not a document.

All of those are okay things, but they aren’t sustainable in the long run if they happen consistently. That’s why I tell you where to find the answer without me. I do need you to work on relying on yourself — taking notes of things I say in class that you think you might forget, looking stuff up on the course shell first, and using me as a last, not first, resource. Since this is an educational environment, I’m here to help if you don’t get your system right for you at first, but I want to guide you toward self-empowerment, not relying on authority.

* Note: being ineffective at something you are trying to accomplish is OK. See: the part where I was bad at the genre I was attempting and yet am a successful university lecturer today teaching this very subject!

** Every instructor must consider retroactive accommodation; I know that in practice plenty of instructors will consider it and then reject it, and so I understand that this advice doesn’t always hold.