Department of Politics

Important: Although regular e-mail is suitable for correspondence and informal submissions to your professors, formal papers should be submitted as e-mail attachments to preserve your word processor's formatting.

Whenever you are submitting assignment electronically, you should

1. Retain electronic copies of your work in at least two separate places, e.g., on your hard drive and on some portable medium.

2. Use the feature on your e-mail program that requests notification when the e-mail is delivered.

3. Send a copy of the e-mail to yourself. Open that e-mail immediately and check to see that the attachment was transmitted properly and that it is the attachment you meant to send.

4. Be mindful of the 10MB limit on the Cornell College e-mail server. This is rarely an issue with Word® files, but it can be an issue for PowerPoint presentations and for papers submitted in the Rich Text Format. Check your file size. 10MB is HUGE, but it is possible to exceed it if you include high resolution photos in their native format. When embedded in a paper, any graphic element larger than 1MB is almost certainly too big. Convert uncompressed files (e.g., TIFF, RAW) to more compact JPEG or GIF formats. If you CANNOT reduce your total file size below 10MB, divide it in half and send it as part 1 and part 2.

Creating an Attachment:

1. Complete your work as you ordinarily would using your word processing software. Give it a specific and descriptive name so that you won't confuse it with all the other files called "paper" on your hard drive.

2. If you are working in Word®, save your work as you ordinarily would. If you are working in any other word processing software, please save your work as a Word® file (*.doc or *.docx). If you can't save to Word® format, save to Rich Text Format (*.rtf).

3. Open your e-mail program and address your e-mail.

4. Click on the Attachment command on the button bar or pull down menu.

5. Browse to the file you just saved and click to attach.

6. Click Send.