Write the email to your lecturer
Pick your situation, fill in three details, and copy out a finished email you can send.
The short version
- Most emails to teaching staff are hard to write not because the request is unreasonable, but because you have to invent a tone and a format at the same time as a request. This tool holds the tone and format so you only supply the request.
- You pick one of three situations, type in the course code, the assignment and a date, and get back a complete five-sentence email (subject line included) in your own words to copy and send.
- Nothing is saved and nothing is a test. It arranges what you type into a shape that works, and hands it straight back.
One principle sits underneath all of these: state the request in the first two lines. Staff read email in gaps between other things, on a phone, at speed. A request that arrives in paragraph four often does not arrive. Five sentences is not a shortcut, longer emails get slower answers, not better ones.
Before you begin
Have the course or module code and the assignment title ready as they appear on the course page. Staff teach several groups and filter by code, so exactness here is what gets you read. Nothing you type is saved.
Questions
Step 1
Your email
Copy it and send it
Select the text below and paste it into a new email. Read it once, change any word that is not how you would say it, then send. This page keeps nothing.
Two things before you hit send
Do not over-explain. A reason does not need detail to be valid, and a long account invites the reader to evaluate it, one clause is usually the right amount, and none is allowed. If you added a reason above and it runs long, cut it back to a single clause.
Titles vary, and Dear Dr Ruiz is safe almost everywhere. If they later sign off with a first name, use it from then on. And if nobody replies in four or five working days, that is a follow-up, not a failure, resend the same email with one line on top.
Worth knowing. These are craft, not research. No study sits behind any individual sentence and none is claimed, they are lines that have held up in ordinary academic correspondence. Conventions vary between countries and institutions: what counts as an extension, who holds the power to grant one, and how formally staff are addressed all differ. And whether you get a fair outcome should not depend on how confidently you write an email at midnight, where it does, a department has put a policy problem onto individual writing skill, and that is worth raising through a course rep or students' union. Take what fits where you are and change the rest.
Nothing here is saved or sent anywhere. What you type exists only while this page is open.
Written for Thought Club as general guidance, not medical advice. Free to read, print, and share.