Writing Professional Emails

HOW TO WRITE A PROFESSIONAL EMAIL

Infographic and scheme with main parts of a formal email.

You can use it as a quick guide or as a checklist.

Email Structure Overview

A professional email usually includes the following parts:

• Subject
• Greeting
• Opening
• Body
• Closing
• Sign-off

STEP-BY-STEP guide

1. Subject

• Purpose: To clearly show the reason for your email.
• What to include: A short and specific description of the main message.
• Tone: Clear and professional.
• Example: Request for information about the training course

2. Greeting

• Purpose: To address the recipient politely and professionally.
• What to include: A formal or neutral greeting, depending on how well you know the recipient.
• Tone: Polite and respectful.
• Example: Dear Ms Smith,

3. Opening

• Purpose: To introduce the reason for writing.
• What to include: A clear and direct opening sentence.
• Tone: Professional and neutral.
• Example: I am writing to enquire about your services.

4. Body

• Purpose: To explain your message in a clear and organised way.
• What to include: The main information, organised into short and clear paragraphs.
• Tone: Professional, clear and concise.
• Example: I would like to confirm the details of our meeting scheduled for next week.

5. Closing

• Purpose: To signal the end of the message and indicate the next step.
• What to include: A polite closing sentence.
• Tone: Polite and professional.
• Example: I look forward to your reply.

6. Sign-off

• Purpose: To close the email appropriately.
• What to include: A standard professional closing formula.
• Tone: Professional and courteous.
• Example: Kind regards,

PROFESSIONAL EMAIL STYLE

• Be clear and concise
• Use a polite but professional tone
• Organise your ideas logically
• Use standard professional expressions
• Avoid informal language

Final Check

Before you send your email, check that:

• All parts of the email are included
• The tone is professional and polite
• The message is clear and easy to understand

 

4 infographics to improve writing; connectors and phrases

I'm bringing today a collection of very useful infographics to level up writings and compositions.

You'll probably find this information under the name of connectors, linking words or phrases and, for sure, you'll find thousands of images.

I've collected these ones because I highly recommend the webs where I found them. Don't forget to visit them for info on other topics.

So, here you are the infographics and links to the original source.
In all of them you'll find connectors, well organised, to adjust writing to communicative purpose.

Aprende Inglés Sila
PDF Printable
Pronunciation of words
 

Fluent Land

Cork English Teacher
(Facebook page)

Connectors

Phrases with grammar tips

Facebook activity in the English class

Working Digital Competence and writing in the English class

Lesson Plan

Title "Find me on Facebook"

Subject & Level English, E.S.O.

Objectives: to develop Digital Competence skills described in Area 2: “Communication”, Competence 2.6 “Managing digital identity” (to create, adapt and manage one or multiple digital identities, to be able to protect one's e-reputation, to deal with the data that one produces through several accounts and applications) from The European Digital Competence Framework (DIGCOMP).

• To be aware of our online digital identity.
• To learn to monitor the information we produce.
• To learn to protect our digital reputation.
• To create a fictional Facebook profile
• To create a 10 points list of good and bad habits for online communications: “Do’s and don’ts in online communications”

Tasks

1. Preparation

Students, in pairs, decide on the character they are going to write about; historical, fictional...

Students enter Fakebook / ClassTools.net and create a profile.

• Cover: name and image
• About: date of birth, family info, jobs, studies...
• Blocks: friends, likes, photos, videos.... with images
• 5 Posts with images, links and videos if wanted
• Students save work, give it a password and copy the link given to their page.

2. Showcase

Students watch the profiles created and annotate what they think are:

• Good habits (in green Post-it)
• Bad habits (in red Post-it)

Students do this in relation to:

• safety (giving personal information)
• images / videos match communication purpose
• communications match different types of profiles

To do this teacher creates a virtual canvas with Linoit.

3. Debate

Students, with the help of teacher, find the good and bad habits to:

• Create an adequate digital footprint
• Indentify information that shouldn’t be shared online
• Identifying information given through images

4. Conclusion

Students agree on 5 things to do and 5 things to avoid when communicating online.

They put them together in a Linoit canvas under the title “Do’s and don’ts in online communications”

Sample image of a Facebook page created with ClassTools.net

Crear periódicos y folletos fácilmente con ReadWriteThink

Desde siempre, animar a los alumnos a realizar portadas de periódicos o folletos nos ha parecido una forma creativa de practicar la escritura en cualquier idioma.

Con las herramientas 2.0 esta tarea se hace más fácil y atrayente para los estudiantes y profesores.

En la página de ReadWriteThink podemos encontrar multitud de recursos y herramientas, entre ellos Printing Press. Esta herramienta nos ayuda a crear y compartir las publicaciones de nuestros alumnos de forma ágil y, aunque está en inglés, es muy sencilla de usar.

Qué podemos hacer

• 3 tipos de documentos: portadas de periódico, folletos, flyers publicitarios

• Incluir imágenes y texto

• Compartir via mail en formato Pdf

• Compartir via mail en formato rwt para que otro compañero pueda continuar la labor

• Imprimir

• Guardar y descargar borrador para continuar más tarde

ReadWriteThink nos ofrece una hoja de planificación para que podamos organizar de antemano lo que queremos publicar. Podéis descargar la hoja aquí. En la imagen inferior he traducido el texto para que quede más claro.

Fake text generator to practise writing

There's a new tool for the English class to easily create fake text messages simulating a mobile phone, ifaketext.

No registration is needed, just click on the link and start writing your text. Once you've finished, you can save and share the screenshot generated.

Again, another easy to use tool to let our students practise writing. You can use it to:

• write short texts on a topic
• write short dialogues; giving directions, situations in a restaurant or shop, short answers....
• revise and illustrate grammar expressions

The Cheating sheets Contest

The other day, I assigned my students to prepare some cheating sheets as homework.

At first, as you can imagine, they looked at me in a high surprise, later they were delighted when I explained that they not only had to do that, but also we were going to have a contest and so the winner would have a prize.

I have to say that some of them, suspiciously, showed to be experts, it was quite difficult to decide on the winner.

But the good point is that some students told me, without asking, that they seriously took time to prepare the sheet and "surprinsingly" had learnt a lot. "Really?";)

OK, here you have the result of such hard work.

A Recipe Book

Sometimes giving/studying vocabulary is quite boring. To make it funnier and get the emotional advantage, we can let students prepare their own set of words to study.
This time we were working on Food vocabulary. We decided to write our own recipes but before doing this, we needed to know the vocabulary we were going to use.

These are the steps I followed to do the whole project, which included vocabulary and writing.

1. Vocabulary. Prepare a document with Google Docs where students can write the words they have to use. This time there were two categories; food and verbs.
2. Share the documents with your students. This way everybody will see what is already written and so you will avoid repetition of words. As a teacher you also will be able to see each student's contribution.
3. Writing. Revise / Teach the grammatical structures students will use to write their recipes.
4. Students write the recipes at home.
5. Check the writings and mark mistakes, so students can correct them.
6. Once you have all the recipes corrected put all of them in a Word Document. After that, upload the file to Issuu and publish it on your blog (or share it with your students).

You can see here my students recipe book.

I won't fool you, it's extra work for the teacher, but the result is really nice and students like seeing their work on the net.

Working with Glogster

Glogster gives a lot of opportunities to make traditional posters in a different way. This time, the project's title was "My life picture" so working with Glogster was almost the main task.
Students had to create a poster with the most important pictures in their lives, the good point with Glogster is that they can also add music or videos. Students had to complete the task with a short writing explaining the poster.
It was a good experience, some students really took interest in doing their best.
You can see the results in the 3er ESO blog.

Writing a Superhero Comic

Do your students like Marvel heroes? So do mine.
I've found a site to create comics with these heroes (if you click on the image you'll see it).
I really liked it, it's easy to use and you can easily save the comic or print it.
The problem comes if you want to post the image in a blog to show your student's creations. The document you have when you save the comic is a PDF and I had some problems to post this image.

Image from Marvel

Nevertheless, I think this page will encourage my students to write some short stories in English.

Great idea from Marvel.

Diamante Poems

For those who need help when writing, or just love writing, here you have a very nice and useful site:

 This time I'm presenting a tool to make "Diamante poems". Click on the image to go to the tool.

How to use Diamante Poems tool. See the slides below.

Writing tips

Thanks to Joan Rubies I have found this presentation.
I think it can be very useful to those students who try to improve their writings hard.
It just takes 5 minutes reading it, but I think it will be very helpful.
It provides a good list of connectors.
Have a look at it

Writing Tips

View more presentations from anarosaleda.