With the advent of Internet shorthand and mile-a-minute G-chat logs, habit lends itself to overlooking capitalization and proper punctuation — a trend that many Tufts' faculty members have not ignored.
"[One email] I got was ‘Hey Kel, you needz to fix the Power Points, as they is messed up.' That was the e-mail I got from someone, presumably pre-med," Kelly McLaughlin, an associate professor of biology, said.
"I would never send an e-mail to one of my students with, ‘Hey Bob.' I think that's just a common courtesy," she added.
According to Dean of Undergraduate Education James Glaser, e-mail often yields a more relaxed correspondence.
"I think e-mail does lead to more informality. Lots of rules of grammar and writing are tossed out the window when you're writing an e-mail," Glaser said.
Steve Maher, a graduate student and teaching assistant in the psychology department, suggested that e-mails remove the degree of authority more tangible with personal interactions, and said that this results in inadequate caution when addressing professors.
"People feel much freer to be informal with e-mail than they do in person. Everybody's dehumanized [behind an email address]," he said.
With some correspondences, e-mail can allow students to be brasher in dealing with their professors.
"There have been people who weren't very respectful. They would get downright nasty about a grade, and I would say, ‘Let's meet in person', because I think with e-mail, people can misconstrue things," Maher said.
For Maher, a face-to-face meeting is both preferable and convenient.
"How big is Tufts' campus? Not that big. You could walk for five minutes and actually meet the person you want to get instruction from, who's grading you. People can meet face to face and talk. It still works, just like it did ten thousand years ago," Maher said.
Associate professor of psychology Keith Maddox said that he has received e-mails in which students address him by first name alone. While he would rather that new students refrain from addressing him on a first- name basis, informality from more well-known students is more acceptable.
"I will actually make a statement when I first meet a group of students. I'll say that my name is ‘Professor Maddox'. [An acquaintance of mine] told me, ‘You're Dr. Maddox. You've earned this title. You need to have respect for it and have other people respect it,'" Maddox said. "It is important in some ways because you're in a situation where you want to be friendly with your students and be able to connect with them. But in a lot of cases, you're also going to be grading them and evaluating them, and they have to be able to see you as an authority figure."
Still, many students make a point to exercise caution in e-mail correspondence and have benefited from making a habit of particular formalities.
"I don't think I would ever do that automatically and assume it's fine," senior Sarah Cotterill said. "By default ... I just write ‘Dear Professor So-and-so.' I don't think there's yet to be a circumstance where I've even debated calling a professor by [his or her] first name. I would just err on the side of caution."
It is to the student's benefit to address their professor respectfully instead of casually, and e-mail is no exception, McLaughlin argued.
"You don't get a chance to make impressions. One of the courses I'm involved with is Bio 13, and there's between 300 and 400 students. You do have to be very careful about how you are presenting yourself," McLaughlin said. "I don't think students realize the consequences might be a little bit more severe than they realize. If you start off the semester by alienating the faculty members, that's not a very good idea."
McLaughlin added that carelessly worded e-mails also have the potential to stain future professional endeavors, compromising graduate school and job applications.
"I think people don't realize that e-mail is a formal record if you apply for a job. What if [students] send something to a professor thinking that they had this very casual relationship, and then later they ask this professor for a letter of recommendation? One thing that is going to be in the professor's mind is that the student wasn't very professional," she said. "We don't know what you're going to be like in the future. We can only speak to what you've done since we've known you. I think you do have to be very cautious."
The lack of e-mail etiquette could be a direct result of schools not addressing the subject in the first place.
"No one ever sat me down and said, ‘This is how you write en e-mail to a faculty member or when you're applying for jobs,' [in] the way someone did sit me down and say, ‘This is how you write a cover letter when you're applying for jobs,'" McLaughlin said.
Susannah Krenn, assistant director of Career Services, said that questionable e-mail handles alone can reflect poorly on an individual on many levels.
"One of our career counselors used to work in Human Resources for a large Boston-based company. She noted that when an email application came in from a LazyBoy@aol.com, she wasn't exactly in a big hurry to hire the candidate," Krenn said in an e-mail to the Daily."
But some argue that a professor's teaching style is to blame for the casual nature of e-mail correspondence between students and faculty. According to junior Michael Birnkrant, students' e-mails likely mimic the tone the professor uses in class.
"There are professors who are trying to get on the students' levels, which elicits an aura in which they seem to welcome an informal exchange with students," Birnkrant said.
Glaser said that a certain degree of informality can foster a positive relationship between students and their professors, but that students should use good judgment.
"In a place like Tufts, we really care that students are getting a close connection with their teachers," Glaser said. "That's what you get here, which you don't get at any other place. I think informality is fine. Students should be aware, though, that their e-mails reflect upon them, and create impressions."
