hello erin welcome to all ears english how are you today hi lindsay i'm great thanks so much
for having me i'm really excited to talk with you today yeah i'm excited to have you on the show and
talk about writing one of the topics i know all of our listeners are so excited to learn more about
guys i'm excited today to introduce you to our guest erin labax she is an author and
teacher she's taught writing internationally to international students and professionals for the
last 25 years and nowadays she's focusing more on business writing which is where we are gonna
gonna come in here today she's also the writer of high value writing that is your latest book
right aaron yep yep yep it's a new book based on conversations with writers around the world
awesome i'm so excited so let's just go straight into it i'm going to ask you our first question
because i think our listeners are going to really understand your answer and really feel your answer
here what would you say is the biggest challenge that everyone has with especially email writing
business email writing native speakers and non-native speakers what would you say that
is aaron yeah thanks lindsay i think from all the people i've talked to and taught around the world
we all have something in common in this way that we get a little bit nervous about our emails
and so i think that the issues of confidence when you're kind of like oh my gosh my screen is blank
how do i know how to start how do i know if this is going to sound right to the person
who's reading it etc it's very nervous making for many people yeah there's nothing more scary
than that blank email especially when you feel like there's a lot writing on it right right
yeah you can feel like your writing represents you um and you're writing to somebody important
and you want to make sure that they respond in the way that you hope so it can really feel like
a very serious situation when we're emailing for work yeah i love it so hopefully today's tips are
gonna help us get at that fear because i think the key for getting over fear in life anywhere is
understanding what to do and then going ahead and taking action would you agree with that aaron
i sure do i think knowledge is power and in this case it's kind of like if we understand that there
are strategies we can use to make our emails work we can feel more confident exactly exactly i love
it so good so let's go into today's topic today aaron you're going to give us three tips and we're
talking about how to make sure we are writing confident emails specifically for a western
business audience so this is for our listeners who may be living in the us or the uk and they're
doing business in english they're emailing their colleagues or customers clients or if you guys
are living in asia or brazil or western europe and you need to write those emails right and you
are writing to a native speaking western audience so let's go into it erin what would be your first
tip on how to do this well my first tip is that westerners and and many people around the world
but westerners really really do in a business email expect there to be a clear main point
okay and so your readers may be opening up your email thinking okay i wonder what this is for
and i wonder if i need to do something and so they're going to be looking for that information
in the email right away what is this about all right so this is going to lead me to the
follow-up question what do you see as the common mistake to this like what are your students doing
um that are they bearing the lead you know i love that expression by the way can you kind
of explain what that means bearing the lead yes certainly and that's exactly what what people do
it's you may have written an email where you feel like you said your main point clearly and yet the
person didn't understand or they called you or they didn't email back in the way that you thought
well it could be because that you might have buried the lead um as lindsay was mentioning which
means kind of hiding your main point later in the email okay and the idea of the lead being kind of
a main point what's the most important thing we need to know that needs to happen right away um
i would say after you do your friendly greeting put in the main point in the top paragraph
i love that i love that we should do a follow-up episode on the actual vocabulary we might use to
start to signal to the reader hey this is the main point but could you give us an example of maybe
just off the top of your head what that would look like as you're leading into the main point
any sense of that yeah as you're leading into the main point you might have said something to
briefly give a little bit of context you know you might let them know oh this email relates to the
conversation we had about hiring some new staff or this relates to something about supplies that we
need getting the reader's mind in the right place to receive your main point but then you don't want
to wait too long you really want that main point to happen quite soon in the beginning i love it
so the first tip here guys is you know this is the way to confident emails make sure you state
your main point at the beginning and you know this might be cultural too i know both you and
i are interculturalists right so we always think about culture at least i do speak for myself when
i think about language i think about culture i wonder if you know other cultures around the world
that's good writing right to put the main point somewhere in the middle you know what do you
think i agree with with what you're you're looking at there because we have cultural
differences often with what level of directness is expected for example and a lot of westerners
and especially americans are looking for that direct immediate clear point but in many cultures
we consider it more polite to talk about some relational things or be slightly less direct we
might feel like it seemed aggressive to be direct and we might put that main point later but many
westerners will be expecting the main point soon in the email so it's okay to do that for that
audience okay i love it so that is our first tip that's so important guys if you only implement
this one tip today you are gonna be so much more confident but we do have two more right aaron so
what's your second tip yeah what is it our second tip is you know the reader when they open up your
email they're wondering what it's about but they're also wondering if what their part is
right and when you receive an email you may do that too you might think i wonder what this is for
but also do i have to do anything and so yeah we need to sometimes include that other person
in the email and we can do that by writing what westerners often call a call to action
and that can be a sentence that lets the reader know what do they need to do in response
i love it so these are kind of action items or an action item a call to action
now how do you recommend doing this aaron is this a if it's a long email
is it a bullet a bulleted list or is it just a final sentence and where does it go
great questions i think when you're writing your call to action one of the most important
things to think about is your verb because like lindsay said these are actions these are things
that the reader's going to do do you want them to submit changes to the document do you want
them to reply with an extra piece of information or provide a file right so think about your verb
and think about do they need any details like a deadline or a place or a when but then we
actually still want to put our call to action fairly close to the beginning in an email
and that can feel a little bit counter-intuitive like not what you might expect because we might
think well i need to explain everything and then at the bottom say and here's what to do
but really then we run the risk that what if they don't get to the bottom of the email
or what if they don't read the email with that action in mind
so we actually do want the call to action to come fairly soon after the main point in the beginning
you can always refer to it again later but you do want to give at least the hint that hey reader
you have a part in this too towards the beginning i love that so the trend that i'm seeing here is
we're trying to write an email as you know maybe it is you know a couple a little bit longer maybe
it's a few paragraphs long but really they could read the first two sentences and know exactly what
you're talking about and what to do and by when is that right exactly yeah that's key because
you know everybody is busy and there's always the chance that someone is reading your email
and then gets a phone call or gets called away in some way you want to make sure they've gotten the
most important core of your point and their action before that happens i love that i love that and i
want to encourage you guys our listeners focus on your verbs here as aaron said right submit
reply respond you know or even things like let me know or more casual things right so work on those
verbs and that could be another great episode i love that idea okay so make sure they understand
their action items and buy when the deadline is so important right yeah the deadline's important and
you know one thing to kind of one risk we run when we write a call to action is sometimes in order to
be polite we make it a little soft and then it can sound like a suggestion which isn't enough
so we actually do have to add that deadline and make it clear that we're asking for something
yes interesting and some of this i think could depend on your company culture and the
way that you give kind of a directive you know a direction you ask someone to do something for you
how direct that information is could depend on your style or your company style this is where
we want to observe how other people's emails look in our company don't you think i totally agree
it's a cultural issue and cultures are large and regional but they're also just within companies
yeah that's what's courteous in your company etc i love that that's so interesting okay so good so
knowing our role knowing making sure our you know our reader it's all about the reader what should
they do and buy when this is great what would be your third tip aaron for confident business
emails to a western audience yeah well my third tip is actually my favorite tip which is the fact
that you can get your reader completely ready to understand your main point and your call to action
by writing a subject line that previews both of them yes so kind of back to that idea that you
want your reader to learn right away from your first paragraph just in case they can't read the
whole email right then well even better get them to start learning right there in the subject line
so when i write a subject line i'll write a two-part subject line
one part that refers to the topic the main point sentence and one part that refers to the action
so if it was something like um new hiring committee and let me know if you want to be
on the hiring committee i might say new manager hiring committee colon reply if you'd like to be
on the committee so use a short email subject line that previews both the main point and the action
like food drive colon donate soon i love that i love that this is so good and i think from
the opposite perspective for our students our listeners making sure they understand an email we
know that if we have a little preview of something from a learning perspective we learn better
we know what's coming now we can open that email our mind it's like um at all english we like to
call it opening your brain box so what the email does is it opens our brain box to what's going to
be in that email and we'll understand it better we won't make a mistake in our reading so imagine
how useful this is not just for you guys but for your reader right even if they're a native
speaker of english they need this from you okay yeah exactly it's all about helping the reader
yeah they open your email already knowing what to expect you're already having that conversation
yeah interesting interesting i hadn't really thought about subject lines as being such a
key part of writing the email have you had to work to improve your subject lines over the years erin
and how have you done that just by pure experience or have you done any kind of training on those i
don't know yeah i have had to work on them um and i think email subject lines have changed as
the things we email about have changed and now of course we email about everything since many of us
are remote from one another right so i think over that time i've made my email subject lines more
actionable i think i used to just say the topic like maybe i'm working on a brochure with some
other people and i'd like their edits on my draft i might just say brochure draft attached but now
i say brochure draft colon edits requested that is requested so you're putting the action right
there in the email you yeah because we're so much more inundated and it's so much more important
because we don't have that touch base in person anymore right wow that's so good okay i love this
so just to summarize your first tip remind us one more time aaron what was that first tip to write a
main point sentence make sure you can literally point to a sentence in your email and say look
there's my main point and make sure it's in the beginning yes as we say don't bury that lead guys
and number two what was that that was to provide a call to action and it's it's still courteous it's
okay to let your reader know what you would like from them whether you want them to send back edits
or whatever it might be they want that information they want to know their action very clearly to
make it easier for them i love it i love it and the third one the simple way to get someone ready
yeah we can get somebody ready get their brain box open by making sure that our email subject line
previews the top maybe two words about the topic two words about the action i love it ready
this is fantastic i got like 10 new episode ideas new things that you and i should talk
about eric that we should go into that i think our listeners are going to find really useful i
want to thank you for coming on the show today aaron this has been fantastic let our listeners
know where they can find out more about your work and what you're doing online where can we go yeah
well i'd love to get to connect with some of you online you can look for my book high value writing
real strategies for real world writing um on amazon and other places around the world and then
i have a youtube channel which is just called high value writing also so you can find me there with
some other videos on similar topics i love it and just coming back to the fear that we talked about
in the beginning guys this is the way to get past the fear of that blank email when the stakes feel
high come back to these tips because again we work through fear we become confident by taking action
but doing the correct things in our actions right aaron right well and understanding what we're
doing and feeling like we're doing them on purpose yes it helps us feel confident being intentional
so good all right aaron thanks again for coming on the show it was great talking to you and i
hope to see you again soon i hope so too thanks so much lindsay thanks for having me bye everybody