How to e-mail a student

[Advice for professors.]

As the writer of How to e-mail a professor, I want to offer some suggestions to professors about how to reply to e-mails from their students. I’m prompted to do so by what I hear from reliable sources about profs whose replies to student e-mails are cryptic, rude, or non-existent. Here are three suggestions:

Make your e-mail policy clear to students. If you don’t read and respond to e-mail from students, let your students know that, and don’t share your e-mail address with them. If you have a schedule for checking e-mail, let your students know how long they should expect to wait for an answer.

Reply promptly. I am not suggesting that you check your account constantly. I am suggesting that when you check e-mail and see something from a student, you reply. David Allen’s two-minute rule is relevant here: if it takes less than two minutes to do, do it now. The point of checking e-mail should be to deal with e-mail, not to postpone that work indefinitely.

Some professors make a point of delaying so as not to encourage students to expect instant replies. A better strategy would be to note in your reply that the sender has just happened to catch you online.

Don’t be brusque. (Don’t be this guy.) I like brevity in e-mail — keeping it to two, three, four, or five sentences can be just right — but even a brief e-mail can be made more human in three simple ways:

Address the writer by name.

Reply as if you’re speaking, not as if you’re writing a telegram.

Sign off. See you in class or See you next week can help make a professor sound less like the Delphic oracle and more like an everyday human.

Compare and contrast: which replies would you rather receive?

Yes.

Maggie, yes, that’s a good idea. See you in class.

*

No.

I don’t think that would work, Bart. Let’s talk about it after class.

*

This is a question for office hours.

Lisa, it would be easier to talk about this question during office hours. Come by tomorrow.

For every clueless student e-mailer, there’s another who has thought carefully about making a decent impression in pixels. Professors should do likewise. The longer sample responses I’ve suggested would take mere seconds to type. But if you’d prefer to sound like the Delphic oracle, well, that’s your business — and Apollo’s.

See you tomorrow,

ML

[The two-minute rule, from David Allen’s Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity (New York: Penguin, 2002): “If the Next Action can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it when you first pick the item up. Even if that item is not a ‘high priority’ one, do it now if you’re ever going to do it at all.“]

“Where’s that son?”

André Gregory, in My Dinner with André (dir. Louis Malle, 1981):

“You know, people hold on to these images — father, mother, husband, wife, again, for the same reason, ’cause they seem to provide some firm ground. But there’s no wife there. What does that mean — ‘a wife,’ ‘a husband,’ ‘a son’? A baby holds your hands, and then suddenly, there’s this huge man lifting you off the ground, and then he’s gone. Where’s that son?”

He’s in Boston. Do great, Ben!

Shadow of a Doubt, on location

[“Actors Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, and Henry Travers rehearsing a scene on location while director Alfred Hitchcock (seated) looks on.” Photograph by J. R. Eyerman. Santa Rosa, California, 1943. From the Life Photo Archive.]

Shadow of a Doubt (1943) is one of my favorite films. I first watched it on my dad’s recommendation. (Thanks, Dad.) The film has long seemed to me Nabokovian: Charles Oakley (Joseph Cotten), the stranger in a placid American town, reminds me of both Humbert Humbert (Lolita) and Charles Kinbote (Pale Fire). Uncle Charlie’s relationship with his niece Charlie Newton (Teresa Wright) is hardly the stuff of Lolita (not even close), but it’s deeply disturbing on its own terms. (You’ll just have to watch the film.)

Shadow of a Doubt is widely reported to be Hitchcock’s favorite among his films. But when François Truffaut raised the question, Hitchcock demurred:

I wouldn’t say that Shadow of a Doubt is my favorite picture; if I’ve given that impression, it’s probably because I feel that here is something that our friends, the plausibles and logicians, cannot complain about.

François Truffaut, Hitchcock (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985).

Don’t miss the full-size view of the photograph (still, alas, a little blurred).

Related reading
Shadow of Doubt film locations (Worldwide Guide to Film Locations)

A clean, well-sharpened place

“When I have a house of my own, it's gonna be full of all sharpened pencils”: Young Ann Newton (played by Edna May Wonacott), in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943).

[Whatever became of Edna May Wonacott? Answers here and here.]

Bananastan and I

My imaginary liner notes for Van Dyke Parks’s new 45s now appear on the Bananastan Records website, on the front page and on a page about the first two releases. I’m honored to have my writing be part of the project.

Related reading
All Van Dyke Parks posts (via Pinboard)

Celebrity-handwriting crisis

In the news, or “news,” a celebrity-handwriting crisis, or a celebrity handwriting-crisis:

The handwriting of today’s teen stars “is so atrocious, it’s talked about and recognized through the industry,” says Justin King, a Toronto-based paparazzi for Flynet Pictures and independent autograph seller. “With stars ages 30 and above, they generally have a much more full, legible signature. When you deal with these new people like [teen actress] Elle Fanning, you’re lucky if you get an E and F and a heart for her signature.”

Nation of adults who will write like children? (CNN)

Justin Bieber could use some help with spelling too.

Related reading
All handwriting posts (via Pinboard)

111

If you were born before the year 2000: add the last two digits of the year of your birth and the age you will be on this year’s birthday. The answer will be 111. If you were born in 2000 or later, the answer will be 11. If you were born in 1899 or earlier, the answer will be 211. (If you were born in 1899 or earlier, you’re probably not reading this post. If you were born in 2000 or later, you should be out playing.)

The year 2011 is the year of 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, and 11/11/11. And adding age to year always ends in eleven. Pretty mysterious, eh? Not really. Snopes has an explanation. Maths Questions has a more elaborate one.

[It amuses me that I learned this trick not from an online source but from my dad, who got it from a neighbor. Neighbors: the original Internets.]

Condiment challenge

[“Assortment of condiments to accompany lamb curry.” Photograph by John Dominis. United States, 1964. From the Life Photo Archive.]

I don’t know how I found my way to this photograph. I do know that I cannot identify all sixteen condiments. (I can identify just five.) How about you? You’re welcome to leave your best guesses in the comments. To identify condiments, think of them as forming four rows, left to right, from the top: 1, 2, 3, 4; 5, 6, 7, 8; and so on.

Here’s a larger version of the photograph that might help. Clicking on “Back to image details,” lower left, will give you the answers.

A Great American Dream Machine thought

The fortieth-anniversary special aired on my PBS affiliate last night, and it made me realize that 1971 is a long time ago. The editing and graphics that once made The Great American Dream Machine look so great look faux-retro now. (Not retro: faux-retro.) My son Ben wondered whether people really thought and spoke as they did in the anthology’s clips, particularly in a series of short interviews about martial fidelity. “It’s 1971,” said one fellow, meaning that the time for loyalty to a partner had passed. A married thirtyish woman explained the rules of adultery: good taste, no tell-tale signs. At the other end of the spectrum, a segment on Fascinating Womanhood, offering instruction in wifely subservience. (Yes, FW is still around.)

Missing: Kramp Heritage Loaf, a parody of the recipe commercials that used to litter television (“brought to you by Kraft”). Sorely missing: the conversations among Studs Terkel and company in a Chicago bar. (How can you have a GADM retrospective and leave out Studs Terkel?) Surprisingly present: Andy Rooney, who turns out to have been a regular, as tiresome then as now.

The best thing in last night’s show: Elaine Stritch singing Stephen Sondheim’s “The Ladies Who Lunch” with piano accompaniment, a performance not to be found on YouTube.

Related viewing
Kramp Heritage Loaf (The Groove Tube version)
“The Ladies Who Lunch” (recording session footage)
“The Ladies Who Lunch” (a later performance)

Alice Notley on “non-careerist”

In the preface to Coming After: Essays on Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), the poet Alice Notley considers neglected poets (the so-called second generation of the so-called New York School) and observes that “‘non-careerist’ . . . is not the same as not professional.” That’s a useful distinction for makers and practitioners who are deadly serious about what they do but unconcerned about making the right moves or pleasing the right people.