Never Write a Bad English Email Again

In many years of both teaching English and working in management, I noticed that learning to write a good email can be a real challenge for many people for whom English is not the first language. Of course, being able to write an effective email is a very important skill, especially in work or study situations. The problem is that in an email, your language skills are very exposed. In an email, you can't hide the difficulty that you have in expressing yourself, as you can say in conversation with a sympathetic listener. When you get it wrong in an email, your reader will notice it. In this course, we're going to focus on the professional and academic applications of emails, because really that's where you're most likely to need to use them, and it's where it's most important to get it right. Throughout the course, I'm going to give you a whole bunch of principles and examples that you can follow to make your English emails more effective. And I'm going to provide you with a range of model phrases, expressions and exemplars that you can use in your own emails. The course material comprises lots of downloadable notes and exercises. I'd also like to invite you to participate in the online discussion forum that we've created for students in this course. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer them in the forum. If you look at some standard English emails, probably the first thing you notice is that they're generally written in a fairly casual, conversational tone. I'm talking about business and academic contexts here. But don't let that fool you. Getting the right tone and expressing yourself with appropriate nuance is really very important if you want to make a good impression on the person you're sending it to. So let's start at the beginning with greetings. The most common greeting in an email is hi. This is fine in the vast majority of instances. If you're talking to your boss or your teacher, they would expect you to use hi. If I'm communicating with someone for the first time and we've never met or spoken before, I'll often start with hello. That's just a little bit less familiar than hi. It's also fine to start an email with good morning or just morning, followed by the person's name. And if you're sending an email to an address where you don't know the name of the person who will be reading it, just hello or good morning are good words to open with. If you're exchanging emails backwards and forwards with someone, a dialogue involving a series of emails on the same topic, there's no need to keep using the greeting. You can just continue the conversation. I never start an email with dear someone, which of course is the standard opening in a business letter. The only time people use dear as the opening is in very formal communications. When government departments write to you, they start their emails with dear Mr so-and-so. When lawyers write to you, they start their letters with dear. When people receive emails starting with dear, it doesn't make them feel relaxed and comfortable. Often people will follow up their initial greeting with a second line intended as a friendly opening to the communication. Now this is where we first encounter the question of tone. What do you say and how do you say it in order to create the best impression? People often write hope you're well. It's okay, but it can sound a bit formulaic and insincere, like when you buy a hamburger and they say have a nice day. If you can find something more personalized to say to the person, then that's good. During the especially when there's a new lockdown, people in Australia tended to say things like hope you're safe and well, or hope you're doing okay in lockdown, and that sounds nice. Depending on the time of year, you can sometimes say hope you had a nice break after the Christmas or Easter holidays, or hope you had a good weekend. Notice that with these greetings, two of them have omitted the I at the start of the sentence. Saying hope you're well, rather than I hope you're well, makes it just a little less formal. If you're on friendly terms with the person you're emailing, it's perfectly natural to open with how's it going? But be aware that this is quite a familiar greeting, not something you'd say to someone with whom you have a formal or distant business relationship. Sometimes before the weekend, people will open with happy Friday, which is a shorthand way of saying yay the weekend is coming. But avoid cliches. Hope this email finds you well. People often use it, but to me it sounds unnatural and actually a little bit pretentious. If you want to add a personal touch to a work email, sometimes it's best to do it at the end or even in a post script. I'll talk more about those when we get to closing your email. Now at the start of this lesson, I said that English emails are usually written in a fairly casual conversational style. Throughout this course, I'll be providing you with lots of common conversational phrases that you can use to achieve the right tone. But ultimately, your most useful resource for checking your tone is your own sense of what sounds right. Ask yourself if you can imagine using these words in conversation. Have you heard other English speakers using these phrases? In other words, do they sound right? And the best way to develop your sense of what sounds right is to speak English as much as you can with as many people as you can. There is no better method for improving your English than to find a conversation buddy and talk to them. Go online. There are plenty of sites, plenty of apps that can connect you with language buddies. It can feel like hard work. It can feel intimidating, but it's the thing that's going to make the biggest difference. Here's an email I received recently from another company. It's a standard, relatively formal business communication. And as you can see, the purpose of the email is to say, no, no, we're not doing business. Hi, Peter. Our Sydney plant manager, Mario Malani, forwarded your email request to me. Having reviewed your request and based on our foreseeable forecast commitments, we are not in a position to take on additional work. I appreciate you considering Magna Foods for this project. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Kind regards, Janet Jones, Marketing Manager. But notice that even with an email like this, the greeting is, hi, Peter. When starting an email using hi, you should follow it with the person's given name, not their surname. If you're sending an email to me, you would start it, hi, Peter, not hi, Peter Macmillan. And by the way, it's the same in a letter that you start with dear. You can write, dear Peter, or more formally, dear Mr. Macmillan, but you should not write, dear Peter Macmillan. If you think about it, almost every email chain involves some kind of request, a request for action, a request for information, a request that people pay attention to something. And remembering that the expected tone of an email is casual and conversational, it's important in making your request that you do so in a light, informal tone. When I look back over my sent items, when I've initiated the email chain, I notice I almost always use the word just. Giving information. I just need to let you know. In other words, it's important for them to hear this. I just thought you would like to know. They'll be interested to know this. Just wondering if, or I just wanted to ask. I need some information from you. Adding just to the request is a way to imply that it's really just a small thing, a minor detail, and that you're not requesting anything big. And as we saw in the last lesson, it becomes even more conversational in tone if you drop the pronoun at the start. Just wanted to ask. Notice this phrase also, I just wanted to ask. You want to ask this now. You're talking about the present time, but the word wanted is in the past tense. What's going on here? In English, we'll sometimes use a past tense verb, even though we're talking about the present moment, to put some distance between the speaker and the topic. So if you use the present tense, I want to ask, it sounds a little more urgent, a tiny bit more demanding. If you use the past tense, I wanted to ask, it's like you're stepping back a little. You're not quite so attached to the question. I wanted to ask is a softer request than I want to ask. Now, in spoken conversation, it's usually perfectly acceptable to use the phrase, it's clear, it's straightforward. But in an email, using the past tense, I wanted to ask makes the request just a little bit gentler. The thing to remember about emails as compared to a spoken request is that in an email, you don't have the advantage of observing the other person's reaction and modifying your tone accordingly. If you're face to face with someone, you can always soften your request with a smile or your tone of voice. In an email, you are completely reliant on your written words to generate the positive response in the person you're speaking to. So people tend to be even more explicitly polite in emails than they are in spoken conversation. There are some other common ways to soften the tone of a request in an email. Let's pick a scenario. You've just paid an invoice and you want to let the supplier know so that they will release the stock. Now, if you say, please release the stock, it's not exactly rude, but it sounds very official and not particularly friendly. Instead, you can say, could you release the stock, please? Again, by using the conditional could, you're putting some distance between yourself and the request like you did with I wanted to ask. If you want to sound a little more formal, but still very courteous, you could say, I'd be grateful if you would release the stock now. Now, you might be thinking, well, we've paid for it, so they have to release the stock. Why do I have to be so respectful? It's really the culture of business in English speaking countries. And this is an important point. The reason that emails are such an important tool is because they convey a lot more than just the content of the request. They also convey a lot of indirect information about the company and about the relationship between you and your audience. The right tone tells your audience that you are friendly and approachable, but also courteous, competent and professional. Yes, you are clear about what you want, but you also know the appropriate protocols for a business communication. If your tone is a bit wrong, you will still probably get the thing you're requesting. But you might also miss the opportunity to enhance the business relationship. It's really about making the other person feel even unconsciously that this is a person like me. This is someone I can work with. I've been involved on behalf of companies I've worked for in some fairly savage disputes with other companies. And even then, the email communications were conducted in a civil tone. Even if you don't want to sound friendly when you're requesting something, you should still use conventional, polite phrases such as, could you please let me know. Now, it's important also in an academic context to get the tone right. If you are studying in an English speaking country, you will need to communicate with your teachers by email. As an overseas student in the USA or Britain or Canada or Australia, perhaps your biggest challenge in doing the course will be in showing that you can master the English language course content. Of course, you will be writing emails in English, you will be speaking English in tutorials, and you'll be answering exam questions that are written in English. Teachers in English speaking universities are acutely aware of the challenge this presents to non-English speaking background students. And I'm sorry to say, in some cases, they will assume that you are a less capable learner than some of their native English speaking students. This is not because they're racist, usually. And it's often not even a conscious attitude that teachers have. But if the teacher notices that your emails sound more or less like the standard English they expect from a student, then you could well gain an advantage by planting the thought in the teacher's mind that this is someone who knows what they're doing. And perhaps it means you're taken a little more seriously by your teachers. So let's look at some more examples of getting the right tone and the wrong tone. I seem to receive a lot of requests from my Chinese colleagues asking me to kindly do something. Would you kindly follow up with the factory, please? This is very polite and it actually sounds quite formal. And coming from colleagues that I work with every day, it's unnecessarily formal. So again, following the principle that business emails should sound both courteous and casual, I recommend using a more casual phrase of the type we looked at before. Here are some more casual but polite ways of requesting action from someone. Would you mind letting them know? Would you be able to let them know? Could I ask you to let them know, please? And this one, which sounds very polite. Could you possibly let them know? When you reply to an email that you've received, after the usual hi, greeting, people will often start with, thank you for your email. This actually sounds a bit formal. And it's used as an opening, even in email exchanges about legal disputes. Thanks for your email is a tiny bit less formal. And thanks for getting in touch is less formal again. Nice to hear from you is friendly and not too familiar. People will sometimes use that when it's the first time in a long time that they've received an email from the other person. One very common use for emails is as a follow up to a phone conversation, or a face to face meeting. There are some standard phrases that are used in this context. Thanks for your time on the phone this morning is a common, polite way to introduce a follow up email. A more casual acknowledgement is to say, it was good to chat to you this morning, or simply, good to chat this morning. As discussed, is a standard way to refer back to the things you talked about in your earlier conversation. It's often necessary to reply to an email that you have received, simply to acknowledge that you have received it. In this context, it's often sufficient to reply simply with thanks, and the person's name. A more formal version of this is received with thanks. An acknowledgement of receipt that's not standard English, but which I commonly see in the emails of non-English speakers is well received. It's not something a native speaker would generally use. In a previous management job, I used to receive maybe 100 emails a day. Now, if you're emailing someone who has that many demands on their time and attention, you need to make your point efficiently. In practice, if you try to make people read more than, say, 100 words, the chances are that at best, they'll skim read it, and probably ignore some of the details. And at worst, they'll get annoyed and just not bother. So, if you think the information you're sending requires a lot more than 100 words, ask yourself, first of all, can it be condensed? And secondly, whether the best way to send it is in the body of an email. If you really need to send a large amount of text, you could consider putting it in a separate document and sending it as a file attachment. That way, your email just has to say what you're emailing about and point to the attachment. That kind of prepares your audience for the task of reading the long text, and maybe they'll set some time aside to read it, rather than fitting it in with the other 99 emails they have to get through. Oh, and speaking of file attachments, also tell the person in the email that you're attaching something, and what it is you're attaching. Don't just assume that they will notice it. It's enough simply to include a line that says, attached copy of blah, blah, blah, blah. Be very careful of marking the email urgent. This can be very provocative and annoying, because it comes across like you're saying to the other person, pay attention to my email, because it's more important than all the other emails you've received. I remember there was someone in the HR department at a place I once worked, who marked all her emails urgent. Personally, I found it so aggravating that I developed a permanent prejudice against her, and perversely gave less importance to her emails than I otherwise might have. The only time I've used urgent on an email has been when I've been sending it to my own staff, and I'm a little bit annoyed that something has not been done. Marking the email urgent gives the signal that I expect it to be done now. But even if you judge that a situation justifies hitting the urgent button, I suggest you use it very sparingly. Now, let's return briefly to the question of tone. Remember that we said in an earlier lesson that even though you're using a conversational tone, an email is a different context to a conversation, because you cannot monitor the reactions of the person you're addressing and modulate them in real time. If you say something in conversation that makes the other person look unhappy, you can rephrase what you said, you can reassure them that you didn't mean anything negative, you can smile at them, you can show your intention through your facial expression and body language. In an email, the only thing they receive is the words you've written. Something that even native speakers have to learn about emails is that when you are communicating in words alone, it is harder to ensure your audience will understand your words the way you intend them. They can't hear your tone of voice, which in a spoken conversation would reassure them that you are making a joke. I've experienced this even with close friends. I've said things in emails that in a conversation they would laugh at because they could recognize from the way I say it that I was being playful, but when they read it in an email they got offended. So my suggestion is to be very careful about the way you use irony or sarcasm in an email. If you're making a joke in an email, check to be sure that your audience will understand you intend it as a joke. If you're not sure about the spelling in an email, check it before you send it. If your email contains spelling mistakes, your audience will notice. They might not judge you for making the mistakes, but then again, they might. I would say this relates particularly to people's names. It can feel a little disrespectful when you receive an email in which your name is spelt wrongly. Also, make sure you use capital letters correctly in people's names. I always notice when people say, Hi Peter, without a capital P. And be aware also that some English speakers' names have capitals in strange places. My name, Macmillan, for example, is written capital M, small c, capital M, then small i-l-l-a-m. As a general rule in a business or academic email, it's best if you write words out in full, not in the way you would write in a text message. If you want to say, see you later, write, see you later, not, letter c, letter u, later. If you want to say tomorrow, write tomorrow, not TMR. If you're emailing a friend, no problem. But if you want to present yourself as a professional person to be taken seriously, take the trouble to write the words out in full. In signing off an email, I almost always finish with thanks, even if I add some other friendly closing. What are you saying thanks for? If nothing else, you're thanking them for reading the email. People will sometimes finish an email instead with cheers, which is really a more casual way of saying thanks. Be aware, though, that this is a casual usage and not something you would use if any degree of formality is called for. In a business email, simply ending with thanks is usually sufficient. But there are some other phrases that are commonly used. Yours sincerely is relatively formal. Kind regards is friendly and polite. Warm regards, friendly and polite, but a tiny bit gushy for mine. All the best is a little more relaxed, but still friendly and polite. Something that I often see in emails from my Chinese colleagues is a last line saying, I look forward to your reply or looking forward to your reply. It's not a big problem, but be aware this is a little bit demanding. In effect, you are telling the person, reply to this email. A very standard and polite way to conclude a business email is to include a line that says, please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any further queries. This can be included even if you know there is nothing more to discuss with the person. Remember, in an earlier lesson, we saw this email that I received. Hi Peter, our Sydney plant manager Mario Malani forwarded your email request to me. Having reviewed your request and based on our foreseeable forecast commitments, we are not in a position to take on additional work. I appreciate you considering Magna Foods for this project. Should you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Kind regards, Janet Jones, Marketing Manager. Now, they know and I know that this is the last communication. We will not be having any further interactions. Nevertheless, closing with should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me is a standard courteous way to close the email. In the second lesson in this series, we touched on the strategy of including a personalized message in a business email. For example, there's someone at another company that I communicate with by email on a weekly basis. Our emails are mostly pretty simple transactional communications. When is the shipment coming? What are your stock levels? That type of thing. Over the years, we've only met face to face on maybe two or three occasions. But in conversation, he happened to reveal that he followed Liverpool in the English Premier League. Now, maybe a couple of times a year, when I noticed that Liverpool have won something or lost something, I'll say something about it at the end of the email, just a one line mention, something like this, after the business part of the email. By the way, congratulations, more silverware or commiserations, penalty shootout suck. So actually very idiomatic and conversational. And very much a small afterthought at the end of the business talk. Don't overdo it. And don't let it distract from the business talk. But used sparingly, it enhances the relationship. And I know that when we occasionally have a problem, or I have to ask for a favour, I can rely on the fact that we have kind of a friendship. It's important always to sign off your emails with your name. Perhaps this seems obvious, but you might be in a situation where you are the person responsible for answering emails sent, for example, to an info at email address, or perhaps accounts at company name. In this case, people will, of course, have sent an initial email without naming you because they don't know who will be reading their email. When you respond to this email, however, unless it is the policy of your company for you to remain anonymous, it's best if you can sign off with your name. It means that if there's a follow-up email from the person, they will know the name of the person they are dealing with. From the point of view of the company, I would suggest it makes for much better public relations. Then sending an anonymous reply and requiring your correspondent to deal with a faceless entity. Finally, your email app will allow you to create an automatic signature for your emails. I strongly suggest that you use this. For one thing, if you don't set a signature, your email is likely to create its own. Sent from my iPhone or something equally useless. At the very least, your automatic signature should include your name and your job title. You might also choose to include a postal address, a physical address, and a phone number. To sum up, here's a standard well-written business email that contains many of the elements we've looked at during the course. Hi Bob, good to chat to you on the phone this morning. As discussed, I'm sending you the script for St George's High. Could I ask you to have a look at it for me please and suggest any improvements you think are necessary? Would you mind also passing it on to Felix to see if he has any thoughts on it? Attached. Script. Thanks. All the best. John. John Jacobson, Associate Producer in Vision AV. P.S. Enjoy the rock climbing this weekend. Don't forget your helmet. Hi is almost always an appropriate way to start an email with someone you've communicated with previously. Good to chat to you is a friendly casual way to follow up your earlier conversation. As discussed, is a standard way to refer to what was said in an earlier conversation. Could I ask you to, and would you mind, are both polite conversational ways of requesting something. Remember to point out that you have attached something. Thanks is used at the end of almost every email. All the best is a relaxed, friendly, and polite way to close your email. Sign off by putting your name as well as your electronic signature. A brief personal message can sometimes be a useful inclusion as long as it doesn't distract from the substance of the message. Thanks for watching and remember any questions please ask me in the conversation forum and remember to download the pdf files that accompany each of these lessons.