Email Courtesy

Email Courtesy

T. David Gordon

Introduction:

An obscure twentieth-century physicist named Albert Einstein said: “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” Our technologies now develop faster than our ability to think about their humane or courteous use. Before we can assess the impact of the iPod, the iPhone appears; and before we can assess the iPhone, the iPad appears (and then the Cloud). Our tools are being developed faster than our capacity to know how to use them properly. The fundamental principle that motivates the following comments is this: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The basic law of charity (and therefore of courtesy) is this: Don’t make someone else’s life worse (i.e. busier, more distracted) than it already is without some good and sufficient reason.

Anna Post (spokesperson for the Emily Post Institute) put it this way: “Technology and etiquette have a fascinating intersection. Etiquette lets people know how to act in common -- and sometimes uncommon -- situations, and how to expect others to react. But the pace of technology is blazingly fast and creates new situations daily. So we have to apply a basic tenet of etiquette -- be considerate of those around us -- to constantly adapt to how we, as a society, want to use technology.”

Electronic technologies, as Ms. Post observed, have a particular tendency towards the inhumane and/or discourteous. People occasionally communicate things in an email that they would probably never communicate face-to-face. A total stranger recently emailed me, and (without introduction), wrote words to this effect: “I just read your article entitled So-and-So. How can you say so-and-so…(and the rant continued)?” Well, in the article in question I made five arguments for why I understood a particular Pauline passage a particular way, and I also cited a number of orthodox theologians who had understood the text the same way. So I had already indicated “how” I (and others) could say so-and-so. I may have been unpersuasive, or even unclear; but if I was unpersuasive and/or unclear in a published, peer-reviewed scholarly essay that I had worked on for months, was I likely to be more persuasive or clear in an email reply? But of course the sender was not looking to be informed; his question was rhetorical, and all he was really doing was blowing off steam. But here’s the broader point: I doubt he would have walked into my office, as a total stranger, and said, face-to-face, “Dr. Gordon, how can you say so-and-so?” I would either have asked him to leave, or wouldmyself have left (or, were I taller, I might have punched him in the nose), because such behavior, face-to-face, would have been regarded as rude. So why wasn’t/isn’t it rude to do so from a digital distance, hiding anonymously behind a computer screen? Discourtesy is still discourtesy; but now the discourtesy is conjoined to cowardice. Email should not be an excuse for discourteous behavior (and, by the way, I deleted this individual’s email without replying or reading any further; deleting discourteous email is one of the digital revolution’s few pleasures).

The following recommendations are motivated by the twin concerns to use email efficiently and courteously; some are motivated more by the one than the other.[1] They do not have the weight of the Decalogue that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai; they are not moral absolutes, but rather guidelines/suggestions from a person who has studied ethics and technology for over thirty years. I include my rationale for each; if you disagree with the rationale, then you will, of course, disagree with the suggestion. You may violate many of these with close friends or family members, because we routinely “skip” certain courtesies with such friends and family members. Taken as general guidelines, however, I believe they will assist the cause of human courtesy.

1. Use an Informative Subject Line

There is a purpose for the subject line. It tells the recipient what the email is about, so that the recipient can prioritize his/her emails (or respectfully choose to delete without reading, as I do for many of mine). On a busy day, the recipient may only have ten or fifteen minutes available between meetings, and needs to know which (if any) emails need immediate attention. If the recipient must read the email in order to make this determination, and then determines that the email did not need immediate attention, it is too late; and other emails, more urgent than yours, did not receive attention.

Good:

-“About tomorrow’s Greek quiz.” This tells the recipient exactly what the email is about, especially because it mentions the particular class (“Greek”); this is much better than “About tomorrow’s quiz,” because I ordinarily teach four courses/semester, and have no way of knowing which quiz in which class is being inquired about.

-“Summer plans.” If this arrives in January, the recipient knows it is not an emergency.

Bad:

e-“From John Smith.” This is not adequate as a subject line. My personal policy is to delete all emails that have nothing in the subject line, and to delete all emails whose subject line says nothing. I encourage you to do the same. Better would be this: “Greetings from John Smith,” which at least tells the recipient that nothing particularly important is in the email; it may be opened at the recipient’s leisure.

“About tomorrow’s class.” I ordinarily teach four; this does not even tell me which class the email is about. “Tomorrow’s Greek class,” or “Tomorrow’s HUMA 201 class” is better.

-“Important question.” The question may be important to you, but not important to the recipient. Say something more specific: “Important question about Greek.” Even better: “Greek question” (and let the recipient be the judge of how important it is). Worst of all: “Question.” Nearly all emails have some sort of question in it, so to put “Question” in the subject line is scarcely better than saying “Email” in the subject line.

Nothing would be more useful to me than a spam filter that automatically deleted emails that had nothing in the subject line; I’ve been trying for at least five years to figure out how to do this, and so far none of my computer-savvy friends have had a solution. If you have one, please let me know.

2. Introduce yourself.

In our culture, where we have many contacts from many experiences, do not assume the recipient knows who you are just by name. To answer your email thoughtfully, the recipient needs to know something about you. I sometimes receive theological questions from people who know me, but whom I either do not know or have forgotten (maybe they read an article or book I wrote?). In answering the question, it helps to know whether the person is a college grad or not, a seminary grad or not, a pastor, a professor, a deacon, etc. That is, I need to know how much theological knowledge the person probably already has, in order to know how to answer efficiently. Unless you are 100% sure the person will know you by name (e.g. you are President of the United States), introduce yourself briefly:

Examples:
“Dr. Gordon, you may not remember me, but I was a Greek student of yours at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.”

“Dr. Gordon, you may have forgotten, but I visited your church in New Hampshire in the early 1990s.”

“I didn’t have you as a professor, but I was a student at Grove City College, and graduated in 2004.”

“I was recommended to you by your former colleague, Bob Smith.”

“I am a recent graduate of Covenant Seminary, and I read an article of yours in Modern Reformation.”

“We have never met, but I am a deacon and Sunday School teacher at First Baptist Church in Nashville, TN.”

Some people (courteous people) include a “signature” in their emails, because this electronic signature identifies them. My signature, for instance, is this:

“Dr. T. David Gordon
Professor of Religion and Greek
Grove City College

If you put an instructive signature at the bottom of your emails, you may not need to introduce yourself (and consider including your name in your email address, which also helps the recipient recognize who you are. “” does not tell the recipient who you are, and indeed, by concealing your identity the recipient may regard you as less clever than you think). A college student could easily provide something like this:

Charlotte Smith

Grove City College 2017

Marketing Management

Your introduction effectively permits the recipient to determine whether to give you his/her attention, and what kind of attention to give. No one has an infinite amount of attention to give. On a given day, I have my wife, my daughters, my students, fellow colleagues in the ministry or in the college; editors, readers, fellow church-members, etc. who might wish to have my attention. I constantly must decide how much attention to give to various individuals and various projects (working on lectures or writing essays, books, articles, and reviews). If I give half an hour to answering one individual’s email question, that is a half-hour that I am not giving to someone else or something else. I need some justification for making that decision. I routinely delete emails without a reply, simply because some anonymous individual asks me a fairly complex theological question without introducing himself. I simply do not have thirty to sixty minutes in an average day merely to satisfy someone’s curiosity. If he is a pastor, working on a sermon, then my commitment to the church is such that I take the time to help; my helping a pastor helps everyone in his church, so there is an excellent return on the investment of my time. But I simply cannot be the “Bible answer man” for every individual on the planet who has an email account; I need a reason to give my attention, on a given day, to one individual vs. another.

3. Emails are not novels

If you have more than a page or so, you should ordinarily use an attachment created in a word processor. Few peopledesire to read a ten-page email; they would rather print it first. When I see that an email is more than a page long, I often delete it without reading it. Word processors format written English much better than email, which was/is designed for quick memos. If you have something lengthy to say, compose it in a word processor and attach it.

Just as important, do not ask the recipient to write you a novel--the virtue of email is a rapid reply to a straightforward question; it is no place for a general or lengthy discussion: Here are some that I simply delete when I receive them:

--“Dr. Gordon, I would be interested in your take on the question of divine sovereignty v. human responsibility.” This is a profound and serious question; I am not going to write a 200-page theological treatise in answer to an email. Further, ordained as I am in the Presbyterian Church in America, the Westminster Confession of Faith is my confession, so what it says is my “take” on the matter. One might as well ask a Lutheran minister what his “take” on the Lord’s Supper is. Read the Standards of Concord, which are his confession of faith, and they will tell you the standard Lutheran answer.

--“Dr. Gordon, how do I study for your class?” First of all, this question should be raised in class, so I can answer it once for 25 students rather than answer it 25 separate times. Second, isn’t learning how to learn part of what college teaches us? That is, I do not know (and cannot know) the particular cognitive abilities of each of my students; therefore, what works for one may or may not work for another anyway, so all I could do is say something general, such as, “Read the material, looking for the most important vocabulary, concepts, and information, perhaps making marginalia or taking notes; and do the same with the lectures.” Visit me in my office, and I will do my best to assist you with questions about your particular study skills; email is not the place to attempt such a thing.

--“What do you think about the attached/linked/referenced article/essay/book?” Ordinarily, it is inappropriate to ask an academic to write a personal review, just for you. Most articles/essays/books have stronger points and weaker points, and evaluating them thoroughly and fairly is a difficult and time-consuming task (for which I am ordinarily paid a couple hundred dollars, if I do it for a journal). If you have a specific question about a work, a question that can be quickly answered, that is fine, e.g., “Do you know if Dr. Schuchard studied under Neil Postman?”, or “Is So-and-So regarded as a competent New Testament scholar?” But to ask an academic to review a work generally is to ask him to read it several times, carefully, and then to compose a thoughtful, fair reply; in short, it is an invitation for him to spend four or five times as much time on the matter as you did.

4. Don’t tie people up with lengthy attachments (and explain them).

You may think the YouTube video you just watched was the most interesting/edifying/amusing thing you’ve ever seen. Your recipient may not wish to spend five minutes watching it only to disagree. Explain briefly what the video is about, so the recipient can be the judge of whether he does or does not wish to watch the thing (Note: “Really cool video” or “You’ll love this” is not an explanation; it is a value-judgment that tells the recipient nothing about the content). I rarely open an attachment without such an explanation. I also keep a mental list of people who occasionally or frequently send me such junk, and I ordinarily don’t open anything they send any more. So don’t ask me: “Did you see that YouTube I sent you?”, because, if I answer “no,” that means I’ve put you on the ****-list because of your previous indiscretions.

5. Quantify attachments

If you include a video or audio attachment, indicate how long the attachment will take: “Five minute interview with Neil Postman” tells the recipient what the attachment is about (the late Prof. Postman), and that it will take only five minutes. The recipient may then decide whether he has enough interest in Neil Postman to watch a five-minute interview.

Not long ago, I received an email from a total stranger (I may have known him once, but I did not recognize anything about him, and he did not introduce himself, see #2 above) who attached a .wmv file, saying, “if you watch this to the end you will understand why I sent it.” Well, I watched it to its (12-minute!) end, and was still entirely clueless as to why it was sent to me; I had no idea at all. All I knew was that a total stranger, with no self-introduction, had expended 12 minutes of my day. Such behavior is simply uncharitable; it does not pass the “Golden Rule” test. None of us would dream of saying to a total stranger: “Go outside and stand on the sidewalk for twelve minutes; then come back in and return to your work;” but with email attachments we do the equivalent routinely.

If the attachment is an MSWord (or pdf) file, indicate how many pages long it is (e.g., “5 pages, DS”), so the recipient can know whether he/she has time to read it now or should wait for another occasion. I rarely knowingly send an attachment such as this without indicating its length; the only exception I make is if someone solicits the file: “Dr. Gordon, I understand you wrote an article/chapter/paper on X; would you send it to me as an attachment?” Under such circumstances, I send the solicited file; under all unsolicited circumstances, I indicate to the recipient how long the file is.

6. Don’t send emails to everyone you know; select your recipients wisely.

When I had Stage III cancer, and wasn’t sure whether I would survive or not, I only sent my weekly update to my immediate family. If others asked to be included, I then included them; otherwise, I did not assume other people’s world revolved around mine. My situation was literally “life or death,” but even then, I did not presume that everyone was interested in whether I lived or died (or what position they took on the matter…). Why do you think the content of your emails is more important than my cancer was? Every email you send is an intrusion upon the life of its recipient, albeit possibly a minor intrusion. Think about which people you are sending it to; and do not lazily send it to your “all” list (Why does anyone even have an “all” list? Does anyone other than God deserve universal attention? Or are you God?).

7. Don’t hide your message behind some background “wallpaper.”

I routinely receive emails that cannot easily be read because someone has chosen some busy, distracting “wallpaper” as a background for their emails. I refuse to go to the effort of cut-and-pasting the message into Microsoft Word just to read it; I just delete it. You should too. You would never think of meeting a person face-to-face to ask a question, and then turn your back while talking, making it hard for the other individual to read your lips and understand what you are saying. So why obscure your email questions/comments behind distracting wallpaper? In fact, why do the software engineers even include it as an option? What were they thinking? (Perhaps we should consider requiring computer engineers to take a remedial course in Humanity 101, to prevent them from making things simply because they can be made).