This is an incredibly helpful communication tip that I learned from someone who worked in the university's teaching center: make a statement, then ask a question related to the statement.
It sounds simple, but I reword emails that I write this way from the way that I write them at first, and they come off as so much friendlier.
E.g., An email to my postdoc advisor as we are submitting lots of abstracts together to a conference.
Before: "Do you know how to submit all the related abstracts together as one session? I haven't seen anything on the website, or heard back yet from the email I sent to the conference asking about this."
After: "Your past emails sound like you know how the conference likes to accept related abstracts. I looked on the website and asked the conference, but haven't heard back. Do you know how we should be submitting the abstracts as a single session?"
The second way states a lot more about my assumptions and what I know right now, and prevents miscommunication.
No comments:
Post a Comment