Two emails this morning have got me realizing how good it is for some things and how horrible for others.
The first is a complaint about grades. I began to compose an answer explaining why they student's grade kept going down from first draft to second to final (hint: no change/improvement!) but then realized, I'm not about to defend my grading criteria via email, so erased all of it and told the student to make an appointment. If he shows up, I'll talk.
The second is a series of emails from the web developer for the online work I do, asking for "descriptions" of each of the sections of a course we've developed. I've said in at least three emails that the title of each section is pretty descriptive of what's within it. Since the developer has all the titles, I figure it would be easy to replicate that in the description. But I still keep getting emails asking for the description of each section.
Finally, I spent a half hour taking the document that lists all the titles, and adding a description line. Each line looks something like this:
[title] "describes [title]"
Seriously.
Somehow I suspect walking down the hall to the developer's cubicle to explain this would've taken much less time (not to mention my frustration) than having to write out an entire page of titles with the word "describes" in front of them!
Email's great for some stuff - I love it and regularly communicate by it, even sending off long missives... after all, I organized a whole conference long distance via email! But there are limits...
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