Can I use "well received" as a response to professional emails?

I am a PhD student. Sometimes my professor sends me an email to inform me about something. Can I used "well received" to respond to her message?

As compared to poorly received? Are you trying to simply confirm that her email arrived, or do you want to comment on how you appreciate the contents, or.

If you simply want to give a confirmation, use support.google.com/mail/answer/9413651 standard, grammar-error free, and no one can criticize you.

@nnnnnn "well" as adverb doesn't invariably have "poorly" as its opposite, especially not in more abstract senses: in "well-done steak," "well past your bedtime," "well aware" it carries a sense of thoroughness, diligence, etc.

2 Answers 2

If you want simply to confirm to your professor that you have received a message, well received conveys more than that. Well received, which is sometimes hyphenated, means that something has gotten a good reaction or has been viewed with approval. For example, "The book was well received by critics." See Macmillan and Collins for examples of dictionary definitions.

While I was looking for sources, I was interested to see that well received is quite often misused in professional emails to convey confirmation of receipt. See Daily Jambo, where it's cited as "one of five commonly misused phrases in emails".

In short, if you respond to your professor that her email has been well received, you are telling her not that you received it, but that you liked it and found it well written or that it contained good ideas. It would sound a bit out of place. But more important, I think, it might come across as a little inappropriate, since she is supposed to be advising you and reviewing your work, whereas you are not normally in a position to review hers.

If you want simply to confirm that you have received her email, a few of the choices you have are:

• Thank you, I've received your message.
• I confirm that I've received your message. (a bit more formal)
• Receipt confirmed. (a bit curt and. distant)
• Thank you for the information.

It should also be noted that, even in the contexts in which the phrase is not out of place, it is usually used for somebody else's reception of the thing in question. One does not normally say 'I have well received . . .'.

@jsw29, yes, that's another problem with it. It's always used in the passive voice, which always sounds pedantic, and makes the writer sound like he doesn't want to take ownership of the statement. It's like when people say, "You will be missed," or "Your work is appreciated".

I've been a native speaker of American English for over 60 years. I've written professionally and edited books, newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, websites. I've also read a lot, particularly from the 19th century classics. A cursory look in Google Books from the 19th century often shows "well received" in the obvious sense as in the examples: "The news was [was not] well received by the Misses Jones" or "The book was [was not] well received by the reading public," indicating pleasure or displeasure. I do not see it used in the sense of a letter or package being duly received, nor "with thanks." And yet, bear with me.

The first time I ever heard something like "your e-mail is well received with thanks" was when I began living in the Far East. The fact is that I get it regularly here, from native Chinese colleagues and from Hong Kong and South Asian native English speakers, most with postsecondary education. What this suggests is that it is probably the default localism from Eastern Hemisphere English dialects, probably originally cropping up somewhere out here at one time. It might well not appear in formal print and, thence in Google Books, for the very reason that the vast majority of English-language printed matter is from Europe and North America.

It grates on me quite a lot to read it, because to me it sounds pretentious and bumpkinish. I imagine a British native speaker might be even more irritated. But then if such a large population is using it, it would be only our prescriptive prejudice as "better heeled" Western speakers to dismiss it as bad English. If postmodern speakers now say, "No thanks; I'm good," how many of us will tell them, "You should say, 'I'm fine'!"? This is how language works and how customs develop, and we have to respect that process.

In other words, if you like how it sounds, use it, and don't worry if I or anyone else look down on you. I for one will try to swallow my pride and get used to it.