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Monday, April 30, 2012

How To Write an Email: The Handout

I've put together a completely cathartic handout. It allowed me to be productive and address a situation in a professional way while simultaneously feeling like I could subversively, covertly unmuzzle myself a bit and, frankly, respond to some student inappropriateness in the way that I would have liked to with the individual students in question. I was motivated by catching myself, one too many times, being really irritated by an impertinent student email and thinking, "Well, one of these days somebody is going to read them the riot act." And I realized that I can step in and say something, without it being a riot act, so that I don't have to read so many bad emails and so my students don't get read the riot act by somebody else in the future. I'm still toning down the language a bit as I edit this for the final version to be distributed, but as something between a distributable version and a fantasy version, I rather like the state of it now.

You can access it in Google Docs by clicking here.


5 comments:

  1. I sent off my draft, so I feel justified in reading *and* commenting on your blog ;) Nicely done, Professor Pearce!

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  2. Back atcha! (Only I'm not done with my paper yet. Augh!)

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  3. This is a genius handout. Would you mind it if I use it to show my students how to write emails? I'm inundated with messages that have no salutation and no signature and that say, "hi when is the final exam thanx." I have started answering them with, "Dear Anonymous. . ."

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  4. Thanks, I think. I'm still tweaking the wording of my commentary on the handout to be a touch less snarky (modeling the desired behavior, and all), so I think I'd ask you to hold off distributing it to students until I've polished the final version (the file name will be changed to say final version at that point). But at that point, please feel free.

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  5. Clarissa, I think it's fit for student consumption now. You may need to copy the text and paste it into a Word document — I've had really mixed success with my margins remaining intact when printing from Google Docs.

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