Lawrence gets a lot of compliments from students, parents, and counselors on the tone we use in our communications with them: it’s friendly, thoughtful, and sprinkled with humor and wit.
Just like Lawrence.
You probably know one of the first rules of email: you don’t get to use facial expressions or vocal inflection to add context to your words, so your words and intentions had better be pretty clear.
So when an email rolled out of here yesterday with the subject line “Don’t apply to Lawrence,” well… it didn’t really sound like Lawrence. It adopted what seemed like an ironic tone (the one where you say the opposite of what you mean for humor or emphasis), but came off as sarcastic (a more negative, off-putting form of irony).
This email really could have used a face, a voice, and some wildly gesticulating hands to get its point across, which, when it was first conceived many months ago, it was going to have–because it was part of a very loose script for a video that, at least in concept, could have been spot-on with its irony.
Alas, it was just words on a screen queued up in an email (without the accompanying video, which was never produced, much less included in the email), and then forgotten about… until it went out to some of our most interested (and interesting) students yesterday.
And for that, we’re sorry, and embarrassed… and hopeful that those students and their parents didn’t take us literally, because, well, of course we want them to apply; they’re interested and interesting students.
Since we are an educational institution, we will share a couple of lessons here. (Woohoo, lessons at our expense!)*
Lesson one is for all other colleges who email prospective students (when I last checked, that would be all other colleges): don’t queue up emails for a timed delivery if they don’t have all the right pieces in place.
Lesson two. Refer to lesson one.
*Stage direction for “Woohoo, lessons at our expense!”: force a smile, speak overly enthusiastically, add ironic thumbs-up.