E-mail Writing

By: Sohail Ahmed M.A English Literature

Email writing

• Email writing has become a large part of modern communication, particularly in business. The world has become much smaller now that we have the ability to send and receive email messages over great distances at an incredible speed. Due to the ease of use it has the potential to be abused and you should try to keep the following points in mind when writing email.

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How much should I write in an email?

• Email is meant for quick, simple communication. As a general guide that means roughly 4 or 5 paragraphs at most. Due to the limitations of formatting and layout, anything much longer than that is probably best sent as a separate attachment such as a Word file.

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Do spelling and grammar matter in email?

• We think it does. Poor spelling and grammar show a lack of attention to detail and sends the wrong message about yourself and how you do business. Most email programs today have built-in spell checkers so there is no excuse! You wouldn't send a letter that was poorly punctuated and uses no capital letters - why not make sure your email messages look professional too?

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Parts of an e-mail.

• To:

• CC:

• BCC:

• Subject:

• Body of an e-mail:

• Attachment:

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To:

• To is used for email address of recipient.

• Here , sender can put more than one address.

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cc & bcc

• There is a certain etiquette with email, especially in the use of the carbon copy (cc:) and blind carbon copy (bcc:) fields. It is courteous to add addresses to the 'cc:' field if those people need to know about the subject but are not required to act on the contents.

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The 'bcc:'

• The 'bcc:' field is useful where discretion is required. People in this field are concealed from other recipients in the 'To', 'cc:' and 'bcc:' fields. They can themselves see others in the 'To' and 'cc:' fields but not the 'bcc:' fields.

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Subject Line

• A newspaper headline has two functions: It grabs your attention, and it tells you what the article is about, so that you can decide if you want to read further. Email subject lines need to do exactly the same thing! Use a few well-chosen words, so that the recipient knows at a glance what the email is about.

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Body of an e-mail:

• The body of a message contains text that is the actual content,

such as "Employees who are eligible for the new health care program should contact their supervisors by next Friday if they want to switch." The message body also may include signatures or automatically generated text that is inserted by the sender's email system.

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Attachment

• Attachments are optional and include any separate files that may be part of the message.

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An Effective subject lines

can make an effective e-mail.

• Clarity

• Descriptive

• Critical information

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Ineffective subject lines

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Effective subject lines

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e-mail Content

Before you start writing, ask yourself…..

• Is this truly the correct person to contact?

• What is my goal?

• Should this conversation be held in person or over the phone?

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e-mail Content

Use a polite and respectful greeting and closing

Professor Anderson,…….

Respectfully,....

Sincerely,…..

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e-mail Content

• Brevity and clarity

• Try to keep each email short

• Use paragraphs (5 sentences each)

• Use topic sentences

• One topic per email

• Provide important dates or references

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Poor Email Content

Sohail, Hey, I was just thinking about the meeting we had about the new workshop you were planning for next week about resume-writing. I think that we may have forgotten to include all of the students who might benefit from this workshop. There are several groups of students at the School of Public Health that were not on your list. Of course you may have added them to you list since our last meeting. Sara from the School of Public Health contacted me to ask if the students from the Epidemiology program were on our list of included students. She also wanted a list of all of the included departments from the School of Public Health. Can you send me a list of all of the included student groups? I can then send the relevant information on to Sara because she needs this information by tomorrow. Thanks, Aiman

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Better Email Content

Sohail, Can you send me a list of the students included in the resume-writing workshop by tomorrow? We may have forgotten to include all of the students who might benefit from this workshop. There are several groups of students at the School of Public Health that were not on your list. Sara from the School of Public Health contacted me to ask if the students from the Epidemiology program were on our list. I will send her that information tomorrow after I get the list from you. Thanks, Aiman

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Format

•Use Simple writing.

•Bullets for main points.

DON’T TYPE IN ALL-CAPS,

IT LOOKS LIKE SHOUTING

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Professionalism

• Always spell-check before sending

• Set your email program to automatically check before sending

• Re-read email for other spelling, grammar and punctuation errors

• Always proofread at least once!

• Read it out loud

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Professionalism

• Complete the “TO:” line last

• Set your email program to delay sending

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Remember…

• Emails are permanent

• Emails are searchable

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•Happy e-mailing! So

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