"How do I engage in rudimentary-human-interaction when dealing with this Professor?"

Question

The title of my question exaggerates a bit to stress its point, but it concerns a class of questions where the OP seeks advice on basic human communication with a professor. I have seen many many question on academia.SE where the OP has some basic inquiry to make and is seeking advice about how to talk to or email the contact person, usually a professor. Often the enquiry is a basic one involving normal administrative matters, with no special issue that makes it especially difficult or arduous, and it is unclear why any special advice would be required. There are many examples of this, but here are a few of them:

• How to effectively e-mail a professor I met briefly about collaborative work?

• How to tell a Prof you are no longer applying to a PhD program at his university?

• how can I ask a professor about funding for master!

• Politely ask a professor about my application status [duplicate]

• How to thank a potential supervisor's email? [duplicate]

• Is it rude to tell my professor about my other admissions? [closed]

• Phone contact after no response from scientific collaborator?

I have not seen questions this basic on other SE forums. I find them rather annoying, since they lack any real substantive content on academic matters, and instead ask trivial questions about how to undertake basic human communication. Pretty much every question of this kind is answered by this general question, but most of them strike me as so trivial that the simple answer to all these questions is: you tell/ask them that thing you want to tell/ask them. Some of these questions are already marked as duplicates of that general question, and this is desirable. In my humble opinion, it would be a good idea to either close or mark-as-duplicate all questions of this kind.

I suspect that many of these questions come out of a sense of nervousness that students, etc., have when they want to communicate with academics. The implicit premise in these questions seems to be that professors are some kind of sanctified emperors and you need to seek detailed advice on etiquette before speaking in their presence or sending them an email. Answers often give some help with forms of words to use, etc., and this is a good attempt to help, but it has the side-effect of reinforcing the view that some special advice is needed to speak to an academic.

My question: Are questions of this form off-topic? They strike me as having minimal to no academic content, and the OP is essentially just asking about basic human communication. If not considered off-topic, are they merely trivial duplicates of How should I phrase an important question that I need to ask a professor?

Follow-up: Two answers have raised the possibility that questions of this sort might come from questioners with different cultural experiences who need assistance with basic communication skills. In such cases, we can also refer questions to InterpersonalSkills.SE.

Answer 1

Questions about academic etiquette are not necessarily trivial. There are certain issues related to cultural sensitivity that may arise in particular circumstances. (For example, how to address an email is a non-trivial matter in some countries!)

That said, many of the questions could be included under the header of "How to ask ask an important question." (I do note that at the moment the answer does not address the possibility of a discussion that shouldn't be had by email.)

If the question is of essentially the same nature, then it should be closed as a duplicate, the same way we now use the "journal workflow" question to close many similar inquiries as duplicates.

Answer 2

To corroborate aeismail's answer, let me give you a semi-serious example of the possible intricacies of academic communication.

Up to 30-40 years ago in my country, Italy, you would have formally addressed a university professor by starting with

Ch.mo prof. X,

The abbreviation Ch.mo stands for Chiarissimo, which can be translated as Most Eminent.

Moreover, if within the text you would have to refer to the professor with a pronoun, you would have quite probably capitalized the pronoun initial.

Nowadays, luckily, these traditions are being abandoned (at least in STEM fields) but sometimes you still get students who use them: maybe they don't use that pompous salutation, but they frequently use capitalized pronouns. When I get such emails, I usually reply: "I'm not worthy of capital letters!". A few students reply that they sent emails to a few old-school professors without capitalizing the pronouns, and without starting with "Ch.mo", and the professors got mad at them.

However, nowadays, many Italian students attend courses which are taught in English, and I've been teaching for about ten years in one such course. And I frequently receive emails in English where every single "You" is capitalized:

Dear Prof. Ortolano,
Could You please [...]

At this point I tell them that they should definitely avoid writing emails in English with capitalized pronouns, especially if they're going to write to people around the world because that, yes, would look weird.

So, sometimes, yes, also a simple email can cause headaches for students (and that's why I've answered a few questions of that type along the years).

Answer 3

No: those questions are not off-topic

Academia has its own rules and to deny that is to deny that there is a world outside academia. As a student, I had to bow in front of Magnificents, Eminents, and other medieval titles mentioned in another answer; once a professor myself, I begged my students to avoid titles with me - leaving them only more perplexed. They don't need to thank profusely when I answer their questions, as it is (part of the reason) why I get my paycheck; contrarily, they regard me as very generous as I am setting time apart from saving the planet/evolving mankind. At times I was offered gifts, a practice that I thought was confined to doctors - a similar priest-like profession in our modern world -always smiling but firmly returning the presents. Academics in many of the world best institutions occasionally adorn themselves as high ranking priests of some archaic religion. The rest of the time, they wear blazers with elbow patches and sandals.

Professors talk and behave very differently from the high school teachers you just said goodby to, or the office manager you are running away from. Students often enroll in universities in distant countries, with very different cultures. Professors everywhere are often dismissive toward undergraduate students. They often have life/death power over their subjugates - no parents-teachers meetings to mediate, no Human Resources offices to help you solve workplace disputes. For as much as we love academia, we need to recognize it's a very quirky world.

Yes, most of those questions are duplicates

That is something that is very common to StackExchange websites, and we shouldn't be dismissive either. Your comment is very timely as it goes along very well with this recently published apology by StackOverflow to its programming newcomers. The average response from experts to beginners in StackOverflow is: this question is trivial/this question is duplicated, followed by a rain of downvotes and condescending comments. I find Academia to be thousands of times gentler than StackOverflow. Still, the same sectarian attitude is there.

The average Academia recent user is a young student who for the first time is facing what is typically a workplace issue - aggravated by the super-human aura of the professor. This site is here to help people; we should try to help. If a question is really a duplicate, we should kindly point to the question it refers to. If we don't, it means it isn't a duplicate. Let's remember that all those unwritten rules we are so familiar with in Academia, were learned by us making the same trivial mistakes, having the same goofy hesitations we smile at on many of the questions we see on this site.