As I see it, my job is to be a communicator. Whether in a research paper, in a classroom, or on the web, my whole focus is (or should be) on the exchange of information. So I think a lot about it. More than is perhaps entirely healthy.

My students and I communicate electronically, via email and instant-messaging. Since these technologies are fairly new, appropriate etiquette isn’t always clear. So I’ve come up with the following guidelines for my students.

Here is my contact information

email: gjleusch@math.syr.edu
AIM: leuschkeg
Yahoo!: graham_leuschke
GTalk: leuschke@gmail

If you want a response from me, please follow these suggestions.

General

Introduce yourself. If you’re writing from your University email account, then I can usually puzzle out who you are, but you can save me the time and effort. I have no prayer of sussing out who goes by ‘pandaluvr88′ on AIM.

Email

Emails should have four parts:

1. Subject line. Your email should have one. It doesn’t much matter what it is — its main purpose is to prepare me for the onslaught of your brilliance inside.
2. Dear So-and-so. This is the part where you address me and we get started. I encourage my students to call me by my first name. Other options include “Dr. Leuschke”, “Prof. Leuschke”, and “G-Money” no, not really. You could also go with “Hello” or “Hi”. There just needs to be something here.
3. The body of your email. Go nuts here — it’s your time to shine! Please make an attempt to use actual sentences, with nouns and verbs and everything. Write out every word, even the really short ones like “you” and “are”.
4. Yrs. truly. Sign off. Don’t forget this step. Otherwise, I might think you were attacked by a rabid wombat before you could finish, and that your last act before being devoured was to hit Send, in the desperate hope that someone would correctly interpret your terrified cry for help and come a-runnin’ with a sprig of parsley (which is well-known to have a pacifying effect on large marsupials). And I hate parsley.

Acknowledge receipt. Let me know that you got my words of wisdom and understood them. Or didn’t.

IM

Instant-messaging is even younger than email, and its etiquette is even more unsettled. Generally speaking, I’ll tolerate many things in IM that I would hate to see in an email. Still, here are a couple things you can do to make our IM communication go more smoothly. Mostly, they come down to thinking for a few seconds before opening that IM window.

1. Introduce yourself. I mentioned it once above, but it’s worth saying again.
2. Keep it business. I like talking to my students. Really, I do. I don’t begrudge the time I spend helping them even a tiny little bit — in fact, it’s one of the best parts of my job. But the odds are, if I’m on the computer, either I’m working or I’m relaxing with a crossword. If the first, I’m happy to pause to help you with anything; if the second, I’m happy to pause to help you with anything. In either case, though, I’m not going to be super-excited about an IM from you saying, “HEY Prof G, waaazzzzupppp?!” I’m generous with my time, but I’ve got to say that a crossword puzzle is more interesting than that.
3. Prepare the math a little bit. Doing mathematics over IM takes some practice. Things like integrals and fractions can be done in pure text, but you have to think about what you’re doing. So now you have two problems: you want to ask me a math question, and you want to tell me what that is. Taking a few minutes before you start, to make sure the question is clear in your mind, will make it easy for you to ask and easy for me to answer.
4. Use your words. I know that the IM-culture is not so careful about the small words like “you” and “are”. However, consider this: I often get questions about, say, integrals in polar coordinates, where a substitution is needed. In such things, we’re going to have variables named (wait for it) u and r! Please, think about your question and whether IM-speak is going to make it hard for me to understand what you’re saying.