Writing formal, appropriate emails is underratedly the most annoying and difficult aspect of being a college student. Formal emails force us to visit a dormant section of our mental dictionaries for words other than “ok lmk” or “r u going tn?” and the actual spelling of “tmw.” Whether you are emailing with a question or sending in an excuse, there is unspoken “fluff” you are obligated to add to formal emails to sound more pleasant. I usually start off with a “I hope you’re well” or a classic “I hope you had a nice weekend.” With these staple phrases, Outlook often tries to predict what I am going to say and helps me complete the rest of my sandwich — but see, autofill is a dangerous game. Even after you combat autofill’s miscalculated suggestions to produce an acceptable email, you then are forced to sift through the email jargon in the response to dig out the important details. It is time we talk about the misery and distress of emailing in college.
When it comes to emailing professors, I prefer to rip off the band-aid. I keep these messages succinct yet polite because I realize they are busy people with busy lives. Sometimes, I get an even more succinct email in response to mine, and then I feel like we are competing for succinctness. One of my professors last semester wrote emails in sentences no longer than five words and no shorter than two words. One day, he wrote, “Class canceled. Daughter got stomach flu. Wife out of town. Identity stolen. Please read for Thursday’s class.” Like, yeesh! Someone should probably check in on that man.
But there are also the professors who loooooove to email. They eat, sleep and breathe emails. These nonstop emailers are prone to oversharing anything and everything about their lives — this can range from detailing the horrors of their daughter's carpool drop-off in explaining their tardiness to recounting their entire weekend.
While I don’t mind hearing about professors' lives, and I even find them interesting occasionally, the issue is that I do not have enough time to hear about your hike that got rained out this weekend. You see, not only do I have the attention span of a squirrel, but I also have 1,238 emails to read everyday, so understandably I don’t have time to comb through an email that is 60 percent about your dog’s matching yellow raincoat and rain boots and 40 percent about an assignment I have yet to begin. With all due respect, just tell me what I need to do and by when — give me the SparkNotes version of your dog’s rainy day fit, I am begging you.
Although I communicate with teacher’s assistants less frequently, these email interactions are always amusing. Every once and a while, we are blessed by the Powers That Be with a smart, approachable and helpful teacher’s assistant. A rockstar TA who understands you and solves all of your problems. My Intro to Stat TAs are the only reason my grade is hanging on by a thread? On thin ice? Whatever the idiom may be, I owe everything to those TAs. The best TAs create an open space for your questions, thus my emails to them are often a greeting and a closing, with a list of roughly 14 questions in between.
And don’t even get me started on emailing my Spanish professors. I’m a business Spanish minor, so I guess I better get used to this. But you know what? It’s 10 times more difficult. In high school, I was too lazy to go through the trouble, so I would begin my email with “Hola Señora!” and quickly switch to English to say, “I’m a little bit confused about the assignment.” But here, I feel obligated to communicate with my Spanish professors in Spanish — unless of course, they speak in English first. Learning the formal email fluff in an entirely different language is a real bear. Boom! Another idiom, I’m on a roll.
Anyways, I just signed up to take an American Sign Language class next semester, and I’m curious to see how those email exchanges will work. Perhaps I will email my professor a video of me signing, “I woke up feeling like crap today. Class is not happening for me, sorry!”
In reality, I miss the good ol’ days when I would wake up sick and my mom would take care of the email part. The worst part of adulthood — as a 19-year-old — is that your mom can’t solve all of your problems with a simple “Dear Mrs. Rainbow” — yes, I actually had a teacher named Mrs. Rainbow, it’s not just a metaphor for happier times — “Margo is sick today and won’t be making it to school.” If I remember correctly, Mrs. Rainbow taught me about idioms. But she could have never prepared me for the hardship of formal emails.
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