In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:
What are the best practices for cold-emailing someone whose work you admire but that you don't know personally (especially if you're still early career)?
What does everyone think?
The Philosophers' Cocoon
A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.
Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)
Contact: marvan@ut.edu
Blog mission & moderation policy
recent posts
- Rejections after positive reviews for a 2nd revise-and-resubmit?
- How serious is the problem of sexual harassment in US philosophy PhD programs?
- Submissions in limbo?
- Publishing strategies: submitting two papers to a journal at once?
- Interview on free will and the simulation hypothesis on “The Free Will Show”
about
Posted in Networking
4 responses to “Best practices for cold-emailing people?”
-
Sometimes I use the title “establishing connections” or simply “cold emailing.” I then start with a short sentence like “sorry for cold emailing you.” I then get to the point ASAP, as I know people are busy. I take the liberty to assume that people are sort of like me: need to know ASAP what I can do for them or what they can do for me. And I end the email with something like “no pressure if you don’t have time to respond.”
My emails were often rather successful. Of course, I really don’t know whether I’ve offended people. And as a second language English speaker, I also admit I’ve never been taught in school how to email people. So maybe take this with a grain of salt.
And please tell me if I’ve been doing it wrong, happy to learn to do it better. -
What I’ve usually done is write them to ask some sort of very specific question about how to interpret a passage, or a view, or how they might respond to objection.
I haven’t done this a lot – just when there’s a genuine issue where I think it could be useful to get a brief email from someone rather than end up publishing a whole article about a potential miscommunication. But it’s gone well when I have. -
I’m probably just weird, but I’ve done this on a regular basis since I was a kid. Once, I was dissatisfied by the answer my high-school physics teacher gave to my question, so I emailed a Nobel Prize winning physicist to ask him. (His answer was actually very substantive – and he provided several papers he had written on related topics). I think that it’s perfectly fine to email people you’ve never met, but I do have some recommendations about how to do it.
1. Have a specific question that you’re asking them. The question can be something like ‘I see we’re about to be at the same conference and I admire your work, would you be interested in grabbing coffee?’ but it’s more likely to be a specific question about philosophy. Don’t email them without asking them anything, or with only vague questions about their philosophical predilections.
2. The question you ask can involve your work, but it should also involve their work. If they’ve written a paper on a similar topic to you, ask how their ideas relate to what you’re working on – or if their paper has applications to a particular problem. It would be a bit odd to ask them about a topic that they’ve never written about – and they might have no idea what to say.
3. Given them an ‘out.’ Include something along the lines of ‘Of course, I completely understand if you’re too busy to get to this – but I was very interested in your paper on xx and would appreciate any thoughts that you have.’ You do not want to indicate that you think that you are entitled to their time.
4. If you have a mutual friend who recommended that you get in contact, mention that in the email. You are more likely to get a substantive reply if someone they know and respect thought it was worth your time to reach out to them.
5. Don’t take it too personally if they don’t respond. Some people get absolutely swamped with emails, and there’s a very good chance that yours got swept up in a group of messages from people they don’t know.
6. Aside from that, I just recommend general decorum; say ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and address them in a manner you think they would like to be addressed, for example.
I don’t view these as hard-and-fast rules, but I think that they usually increase your chances of a successful, substantive reply. -
As a non-academic and hopeful future mature-age philosophy PhD student, I have emailed many philosophers (and other academics) over the years to share my appreciation for their work and tell them how I’ve used their ideas. Sometimes I’ve asked a question about a point in their paper, or for recommendations on related reading. While a few emails have disappeared into the ether (or spam filter), I’ve some had wonderful responses. I’ve been sent related papers, drafts of new papers, thoughtful exposition on a topic, and helpful reading recommendations. I’m very grateful for the time people have taken to reply. Perhaps an email saying that a paper they wrote 20 years ago has helped my thinking about an issue in my job (at an government agency in Australia) is sufficiently weird to initiate a response where a generic email may not stand out in the same way.
Leave a Reply