Efficient Business Email Writing Guide: Enhance Your Professional Communication Skills

Welcome back to Business Communication Skills. Have you written emails before in English? Are you going to be writing emails in English in your jobs or studies in the future? Well this module is all about email. Love it or hate it, email is a very important part of business communication. And in this module you'll learn about writing effective and professional emails. How to write subject lines, greetings and closings, how to choose the appropriate tone, and finally how to start off and end an email. By the end of this module you'll be able to write some professional looking emails, so let's start with the first lesson.

Let's start by talking about some useful email tips. How many emails do you get a day? How many of them do you read? How many emails do you send? It's probably more than just one or two, right? We can become swamped by too many emails, so it's a good idea to follow these tips so that we can make email an effective form of communication. Email is fast, but you should take your time writing an email, especially if it's part of your job. Look at this email. It's hard to read, isn't it? Look how we can make it much easier by a few simple steps.

So this is what we did. We divided it into short paragraphs. We used white space between the paragraphs. We used bullet points, and we made the sentences shorter. Another thing to remember is that we still use paragraphs in emails, even if they're short. Look at this email. All the sentences are on separate lines. It's actually harder to read. It should be divided into smaller paragraphs like this.

Email is not face-to-face communication, and so there's no body language to help the other person understand you. Try to avoid jokes or strong emotional language. Emotions or emojis might be helpful in some cases, but they aren't considered professional. Also, it's a good idea to avoid overusing exclamation marks. Be clear and specific. Other readers don't have a lot of time to spend reading emails, so the less time they have to spend trying to understand what you're trying to say, the better, right?

If you're writing to someone because you want to get a response on a couple of issues, it's much better to write them in separate emails. Why? Because often the reader might just give you a response on the first issue, and then forget all about the other ones. It also helps to track separate issues later. Have you ever hit send and then realized you spelled something wrong or received a reply and seen your original message with a terrible or embarrassing mistake? We all have, but still, it's a good idea to read through the email carefully, especially if you're writing to someone you don't know. Even though it's email, following the rules of written English will make sure the impression you give your reader is a good one.