Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls, hello, I'm Julian Northbrook from doingenglish.com. And
in this video, I'm going to talk a little bit about effective email writing. So I've
just come off the weekly members, that is MEFA and Extraordinary English Speakers,
group coaching call, where I've answered and solved a lot of very interesting, this time,
English-learning, English-using problems. And a couple of the questions were really centered
on the idea of how do we learn to write in correct English when it comes to writing emails and things
like that. And the questions were really, really asking about the grammar and the structure of
English. And one member said, "Well, I know that when you write an email, you've got to write in
formal English." Another said that, "I know we need to write in grammatical sentences so that I
look professional." And this is a good topic to talk about because it ain't as simple as that.
Now, first of all, there are ways that we can learn to check and make sure that the
grammar that we use in our emails are correct without having to go searching around on Google
and copy pasting things into it, and then finding out later that actually it meant
something completely different than what we thought it meant. I teach that extensively
in my MEFA course. And if you want to learn that sort of thing, it's not something that
I can just teach quickly and easily in a video like this. You're going to want to check out
the course doingenglish.com/MEFA for information. But the deeper problem here is the way that people
tend to think about this kind of thing. Simply making the grammar correct in an email does not
a good email make. And if that sounded kind of strange and awkward the way that I said that,
that is because it sounds strange and awkward even though it is grammatical.
Now, people tend to worry too much about grammar and surface-level stuff,
but ignore the deeper fundamentals of writing a good email or really any communicative piece.
So should emails be written in formal English? Maybe. To say that all emails should be formal
is far too simplistic. A good example of this would be a couple of weeks ago,
I emailed the editor of an academic journal where I am trying to get one of my research
papers published. And it was my first contact with this person. And I was very polite,
very respectful and wrote in quite a formal way, "Dear Doctor," and then signing off
with "Best regards, Julian Northbrook." It was a very formal, pretty typical email.
Now, if I was going to send an email to one of my friends in academia and I wrote
in the same kind of way, they'd be like, "Julian, what the fuck? Is there something
wrong?" Because we have a much more casual relationship and that. There's no reason
to start with that Dear Doctor and write in a very formal way. No, it's going to be a quick,
casual, easy email. When it comes to any communicative piece, emails included,
the first question in your head should always be, "Who am I communicating this message to?
What is the best way to communicate that message to this person?" If you need to write in polite,
very respectful, very formal English, write in very polite, very respectful, formal English.
If you are going to be better off writing in a quick, casual way, write in a quick, casual way.
Now, here's a great illustrative example of this. Going back many, many, many, many years,
I had a client in Japan, a student in Japan. And it was when I was still teaching English in cafes,
English lessons. And this particular student was a teacher at a private school in Japan that had
a sister school in the US, and he needed to send quite a lot of correspondence email back
and forth with the school, all in English. And he used to get really worked up, really frustrated,
because he said it would take him hours to draft these emails, these carefully drafted, scripted,
composed emails that he would send off to his American counterparts. And then he'd get an email
back almost instantly. And it'd just be like one line or something like that. And he's just like,
"But how dare they? It's taken me hours to write this. And I have to use English as a
second language. And it takes so long to draft and script these things, and then they just
send one straight back, and it's just one sentence. It's not fair," he used to say.
But my advice to him was, "Think about the cultural context of the people that
you are emailing." In Japan, it's often the case that the longer an email is,
the more polite it is considered. They are really quite long and quite convoluted with
special greetings that go in the beginning and then a long body text. That is the way
emails are written. In the US, and indeed in a lot of English-speaking cultures,
it's completely the opposite. A long-winded, rambling email is considered very disrespectful
because you're wasting the person's time. We want to get to the point quickly and simply.
We want to be able to understand what it is that you are trying to communicate to us at a glance.
So my advice to him was, "Think about how do the American people that you correspond with
write emails, and write like that." So we have this situation where he's complaining
because he's got to spend hours writing these long emails. And then actually,
the people receiving these emails are actually thinking, "Oh, for fuck's sake.
Here's another really long email that can't get to the point." You've got to think about
the person you're writing to and make it as appropriate to that person as you possibly
can. And only then is it worth worrying about surface-level things like grammar.
I can't remember what the... Lang-8, I think it was called, and I used to use it a lot when
I was learning to write blog posts and things in Japanese. And then I realized it's a total waste
of time. The problem with just correcting grammar is that you end up with grammatical English,
but it still can be very, very inappropriate. So first, you've got to think about what is
appropriate. Get that right first. Then, and only then, can we start worrying about the
accuracy of what we are saying. And I'll tell you right here, right now, the best way to do that,
anyway, is not thinking of grammar rules. There is a place for learning grammar and using grammar
rules in language learning and language usage, but it is not what most people think.
Again, this is something that I go into in a lot of depth in my Master English FAST Accelerator
Course, which you can find out all about, if you like, by heading over to doingenglish.com/MEFA or,
if you're completely new to me, subscribe to this channel and head over to doingenglish.com
and sign up for my free daily email tips, which will kind of break you in gently because MEFA
is not for everyone. It is a pretty hardcore, highly intensive course, and I think you would
do well to get to know me a little bit before you throw yourself in the deep end as it were.
Right. I hope you found this video useful. Let me know down in the comments. Do you write a lot of
emails in English? If you do, what are the biggest problems that you have with writing those emails?
If we've got a few good problems, a few good questions coming up, I will certainly consider
taking some of them and making some more videos on this topic, should you so desire. Anyway,
this is me, Julian Northbrook, signing out from this video. See you soon, guys. Bye-bye.