How to ask me to do stuff

If you are asking me to do anything (answer a question, sign off on course units, review a manuscript, etc.), this is a task and should therefore be handled within Teams Planner.

Generally, try to avoid sending me emails (use Teams Chat instead), unless I’m being cc:ed on an email to someone else (which I usually should be if it's lab-related).

Whenever you assign a task to me in Planner, make sure to include a due date before sending it. I may ultimately need to adjust that date, but if you assign no date, it will automatically go to the bottom of my task list and probably won't get seen for a while.

Fall and Winter (September through March) are my “busy” quarter with regard to teaching, and I am officially (though not necessarily un-officially) “off the clock” in July and August (literally - my pay period is from Sep-June). I will usually need ~2 weeks to review a large manuscript (this is standard department policy for all professors).

When sending me things to review, edit, etc., please adhere to the following standards:

• Attached file names should be composed of your last name followed by an underscore or space, then the product. You can also include a date/version at the end if you’d like (e.g., Kamper thesis 013118.doc). This makes it easy for me to identify it quickly among a large number of similar files (I deal with a lot of files from a lot of students). Subsequent revisions should be noted as such in some way (e.g., Kamper thesis 013118b.doc). Include any referenced papers as .pdf files (zipped up if there are a lot).
• Apply the principles of writing brevity as laid out in the Elements of Style:
  • Re-read every sentence - if a word is not needed, eliminate it. For example, I see a lot of "in order to....", when the same sentence will always read better by simply removing the "in order"
  • Another common example is using "if" versus "whether" - you are going to "determine whether x affects y", not "determine if x affects y.”
  • I also commonly see the word “while” when you should be saying something like “although” (“while” should refer specifically to time).
• Do not send out manuscripts to committee members or collaborators without incorporating my comments / edits first.
• Finally, and this is the big one - PLEASE PROOFREAD DOCUMENTS BEFORE SENDING TO ME
  • my job as a reviewer is to help identify ways to convey your information more effectively and eliminate errors in critical thinking, not to fix your spelling mistakes, punctuation errors (e.g., missing commas), past/present/future tense errors, general grammar / basic English sentence structure mistakes, etc. Microsoft Word and every other standard word processor includes Spell Check and Grammar Check features.... never send me anything to review without having used these tools first.