Timeline for Should you always use appropriate letter conventions when emailing a teacher?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 8, 2014 at 0:10 | comment | added | Lou | Well remember, we're talking about repeated interactions, not the first. Once you've established correspondence, you probably know whether it's important, preview or no. So utility isn't a very compelling argument for me here. | |
| Nov 7, 2014 at 20:56 | comment | added | jakebeal | @Novelocrat Well, YMMV, I guess. I, at least, find no significant loss at the size of previews I get in Gmail on either browser or mobile. | |
| Nov 7, 2014 at 20:38 | comment | added | Voo | Apart from what Novelocrat said - which is indeed one major reason (not just mobile clients, outlook shows a short popup too for me), yes, I consider a formalism that adds nothing of substance and makes parsing a message that tiny fraction longer "bloat". I also don't consider adding the greeting particularly polite - a well written and thought out email that includes all the necessary information in a concise way shows way more respect in my opinion. Or as the famous saying goes: "Sorry, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead". | |
| Nov 7, 2014 at 20:02 | comment | added | Phil Miller | For people using email clients (especially on mobile devices) that 'preview' the beginning of a message when looking at the message list, you're replacing the first line of content with semantic nullity. After the first message and reply, the subject line no longer conveys the current 'first glance' substance. I sometimes get annoyed at not being able to see whether a follow-up is something that needs rapid attention, but could have done so sans the 'noise'. | |
| Nov 7, 2014 at 19:06 | comment | added | jakebeal | @Voo Four words is "bloat"? The cost is nothing compared to the cognitive overhead that comes from starting and stopping the email at all. | |
| Nov 7, 2014 at 19:01 | comment | added | Voo | "It costs nothing" - only if you consider your time free. Otherwise the parsing out of unnecessary formalism takes up time and bloats the text - minimally though but considering the dozens of emails everybody reads and writes every day it adds up over a year. | |
| Nov 7, 2014 at 13:45 | history | answered | jakebeal | CC BY-SA 3.0 |