A student emailed me recently with a perfectly reasonable question about an upcoming quiz.

The message was short. Very short. Just one line:

“Hi there, I was just wondering if the content for week 7 will be included or excluded from the quiz on the 14th of April?”

That was it.

No name. No sign off. No self-identification. No real sense of who was writing to whom.

I did not think the student intended to be rude. In fact, I am quite sure they did not.

But the email still unsettled me.

Not because it was offensive, but because it felt like a message stripped down to its bare transaction. Efficient, yes. Clear enough, yes. Human, not quite.

And that made me ask a bigger question.

How a message can be clear and still feel wrong?

A message can be clear and still feel wrong

The student’s question was valid. The channel was appropriate. Email is the right way to ask that sort of question.

Yet something was missing.

The problem was not content. It was texture.

A greeting that recognised the person being addressed. A sign off that acknowledged the interaction. A simple sense that this was not merely a data exchange, but a communication between people.

These may seem like small things. But they are not trivial. They signal awareness of context, relationship, and tone.

When they disappear, a message can still work at the level of information while failing at the level of human connection.

That distinction matters more than we sometimes admit.

This is not really about rudeness

It would be easy to read such a message and conclude that standards are slipping, or that students no longer know how to communicate professionally.

I think that is too simple.

I did not feel that this student was deliberately rude. I still do not. The issue was not intention. The issue was that the email could easily be perceived by others as abrupt, overly direct, or impersonal.

That is a different problem.

A message does not need bad intent to create a poor impression.

And perhaps that is one of the defining communication challenges of our time. We are increasingly surrounded by people who mean no harm, but who have grown used to communication styles that strip away many of the cues older generations still rely on.

We may be mistaking constant messaging for communication skill

This is where the issue becomes more interesting.

We often assume that because younger generations message constantly, they must be naturally strong communicators. But frequency is not the same as depth, and speed is not the same as judgement.

Many students today have grown up in environments where communication is rapid, informal, and highly transactional. Messages are short. Context is assumed. Formality is reduced. The goal is often simple: send the question, get the answer, move on.

In that environment, a one-line email may feel completely normal.

But formal communication, whether in university or in project work, asks for something more. It requires an awareness of audience, role, setting, and likely interpretation. It asks the sender not only to express a need, but to frame it appropriately.

That is where the tension sits.

The sender may feel the message was efficient and harmless.
The receiver may experience it as flat, abrupt, or careless.

Neither side is necessarily wrong in motive. But they are operating with different communication norms.

Why this hit me as a teacher

What made this moment sting was that I had already spent six weeks teaching this cohort about communication.

We had explored tone, emotional intelligence, personality, nonverbal communication, virtual interaction, and the importance of considering the receiver. So when I read that email, part of me immediately felt I had failed.

That reaction was probably harsher than the situation deserved, but it revealed something important.

Teaching communication today is not simply a matter of explaining models or offering tips. It is an effort to interrupt habits that students may have been developing for years. They come into our classrooms shaped by texting culture, social media shorthand, flattened tone, and constant digital interaction.

So perhaps the real lesson is this.

When students communicate poorly, it is not always because they have ignored what we taught. Sometimes it is because what we are teaching is pushing against a much larger cultural current.

Why this matters beyond university

This is not just about emailing lecturers. It is about professional life.

Future project managers will work in environments where success depends not only on sending information, but on building trust, showing judgement, and adapting communication to context. They will write to stakeholders, sponsors, clients, team members, and partners. They will need to influence without authority, clarify ambiguity, and maintain relationships under pressure.

In those situations, technically correct communication is not enough.

A message can be clear and still damage rapport.
A question can be valid and still sound careless.
An email can achieve the task and still weaken the relationship.

That is why these small habits matter.

Not because formality is sacred, but because communication is always doing more than one thing at once.

So what did I do?

I replied in the tone I hoped to model:

Hi [student name],
Thank you for your email,

Week 7 in-class quiz will cover material from week 1 to week 6 only.

Wish you all the best in your studies and quizzes.

Best regards,
Ibrahim

I chose not to correct the student directly. Instead, I tried to demonstrate what professional, respectful communication can look like without turning the exchange into a reprimand.

That felt more constructive.

The provocation for educators

Here is the question this incident has left me with.

If students are growing up in communication environments that reward speed, brevity, and function, are universities doing enough to teach tone, audience awareness, context, and professionalism explicitly?

Or are we still assuming that students will somehow absorb these things along the way?

I am increasingly convinced they may not.

And if that is true, then communication education is no longer a soft extra. It is a core professional capability.

Final reflection

That one email did not convince me that students are rude. It did not convince me that Gen Z is disrespectful.

But it did convince me of this.

We may be living through a generational shift in communication norms, one in which messages are becoming more frequent, more immediate, and more efficient, while also becoming thinner in tone, context, and relational awareness.

That matters.

Because in project work, in leadership, and in life, communication is not just about getting words across. It is about how those words land, what they signal, and what kind of relationship they create.

We have never sent more messages.

But perhaps that does not mean we are communicating better.