ESL Business Writing Video - Email Tune-up 01
Email Tune-up is a new series of business English video podcast for ESL students looking to improve their business writing skills.
Listen and learn how to make a clear, stronger, and effective email message in English, of course.
Establish how to review your e-mail message
All right. Let’s take a look at the e-mail from Simon. I will begin by reading through it, and while I’m doing that, I would like you to see if you can spot some of the errors we’re going to fix. Remember, we’re looking for problems in mechanics, style, and tone. First, we’ll look at the mechanics.
By that I mean, the grammar, spelling, layout, and punctuation. Then, we’ll look at the style, and tone of the writing. Style is the way we use words and Tone is the overall impression or feeling that the words create.
The subject is broadcast faulty message procedure. And e-mail begins Hi All. First paragraph: [see screen] And then the closing salutation.
Let’s start by discussing background to this e-mail. Who is the writer, who are the readers, and what is the e-mail’s purpose. We can see from the salutation, Hi all, that is addressed to more than one person.
And we know from Simon that this is an internal company e-mail. Simon is writing to some other employees at the same company where he works. And the purpose of the e-mail is to inform his colleagues about a new error message procedure and to invite them to a demonstration. These are all things to keep in mind as we make changes to the text.
Now, first, let’s examine the mechanics of this e-mail. By mechanics, I mean formatting, punctuation and grammar. We can see right away that this e-mail is clearly organized into paragraphs, with each paragraph making a separate point.
The first paragraph identifies problem, which is the reason the e-mail is being written. The second paragraph proposes a solution and asks readers to help Simon put the solution in place.
Now, let’s think about how we can improve the formatting, punctuation, and grammar of this e-mail. Beginning with the first paragraph, right away we see a couple of mistakes in grammar. Simon begins by saying, “As discuss with Client delivery team”. This verb needs to be a past participle. We add an –ed and it become as discussed. The phrase “Client delivery team” needs a the before it since it’s noun. And as you can see, we also have two mistakes in capitalization.
The words client and when shouldn’t be capitalized since they aren’t the first words in the sentence. Finally we need to change the punctuation of this last phrase. Right now it’s punctuated as if it were complete sentence even though it actually completes the thought that’s been expressed in the rest of the paragraph. So instead of a full stop and capital W here, we need to substitute a comma and a small w. This turns the entire paragraph into a single complete sentence, which is what we want.
The second paragraph doesn’t have any real problems with mechanics. The only change, I’d like to make is spell out this abbreviation, mins, which is short for minutes. It’s not a good idea to use abbreviations unless they’re really necessary since a business email needs to have a formal style.
All right, let’s move on to look at the style of this e-mail, and in some ways it might be improved. I think we should first look at the subject line. “Broadcast Faulty message procedure.”
The main problem here is the vocabulary. In English, we have some standard phrases for describing computer technology. When a computer displays a message to report a problem, we refer to this as an error message, not a faulty message. So we need to change this word from faulty to error, and shouldn’t be capitalized, either. And we also have to make the same change in the first paragraph from faulty to error.
Even after we correct the vocabulary, I think the meaning of the subject line isn’t very clear. If you read the body of the e-mail, you can see that what Simon is talking about is the procedure that the company should use when it broadcasts error messages.
But, it’s not easy to understand this, just by reading the subject line. So, let’s create a prepositional phrase to make it completely clear and easy to read. We can say “Procedure for broadcasting error messages.” And since we are not talking about just one message, we want this last word messages to be plural, and we need to make messages plural in the first paragraph as well. Now if you look at the very end of this paragraph, you can see that we have exactly the same problem that we had in the subject line.
This final phrase “check all PBX lines status” is confusing because it’s missing some of the very short English words that we use to add structure to our writing such as articles and prepositions. We should begin by moving a word, status toward the front of sentence close to the main verb, which is check.
Let’s delete status at the end, and move it up here, where we also need to add an article, the. Now we have check the status and we need to add preposition of, so the last phrase becomes we also need to check the status of all PBX lines. Now what about style problems in the second paragraph?
I see two things we need to change. Simon’s used a wrong preposition when he says to demonstrate the work procedure in his PC. That should be on his PC.
I also think we need to make the last phrase of this paragraph a little clearer. When he says around 15 minutes in parentheses, what he means is that the demonstration will last about 15 minutes. I’m going to remove the parentheses and create a complete sentence to express that thought. The demonstration will take around 15 minutes. I think that covers all the style changes we need to make.
So finally let’s go back and re-read the entire email from the problems of tone. Starting with the salutation, beginning a business email with Hi all, seems to make a tone of little too informal even though this is an internal company memo. So, let’s change the greeting to Dear Colleagues, and remember that we want to capitalize each word in a salutation. I don’t think the first paragraph has any issues of tone.
But. in the second paragraph, I think we should change this introductory phrase if you have no problem. Remember, we want to avoid using negative words like problem if we can help it. Instead, let’s try to stress the positive aspects of this sentence. Simon wants to help his colleagues to solve the problem, and he wants to make things as easy as possible for his colleagues.
So, we can say something like: “if it’s convenient for you” to emphasize the writer’s willingness to cooperate, and with those changes, I think we made Simon’s email a lot clearer, stronger and more effective. So let’s hit send and get this message out to his colleagues.
Учите английский с нами
