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Write Well-organized Email Text

Hi everyone. And welcome back to Writing Professional Emails in English. In the first lesson of this module we learned about writing subject lines more effectively.

We learned that your subject lines need to be brief, clear, and direct.

In this lesson, we’re going to talk about how to write the email text. The email text is the actual message you are sending which is the most important part about writing an email. Your email text should be made up of three essential parts, the introduction, the development, and the conclusion. Today we’re going to introduce you to each of these parts, by showing examples and providing strategies so that you can write them in a clear and effective way.

Let’s start talking about the first part of an email text, the introduction.

The introduction shows the reader who is writing and what the email is about. It is expressed in the first sentence of your message. The introduction is one of the most important parts of email text because it gives the reader a first impression of your email message. So, to write the introduction, you need to consider the author and the purpose of your email. Let’s talk about each of them separately.

The author is the writer of the email. Grammatically the author’s the subject of your first sentence. There are two ways to write the author. First, by writing the name, position, or organization. Or second, by simply writing a pronoun.

Your choice is going to depend on how many times you’ve written to your reader. If you’re writing an email for the first time, it’s important that you write the actual name, position, and organization of the author. Let’s look at an example. This is the first email between this writer and the reader.

This first sentence is appropriate because it includes the name, position, and the organization of the writer to clearly show who the author is.

However, if it is not the first time you’re writing to the reader of your email, your topic can be presented simply with a pronoun.

In this sentence, the author is expressed as pronouns. This is not the first time the parties involved in this conversation are talking, so there’s no need to include the name, position, and organization. Now that you’re more comfortable with how to begin your introduction, we’re going to talk about the second part of the introduction which we call the controlling idea.

The controlling idea is a statement about the author and talks about what you need to accomplish with your email.

More specifically, the controlling idea of your introduction expresses the purpose of your email. Let’s take a look at the previous example for reference.

In this sentence, the words following the subject are the controlling idea of the introduction. The controlling idea talks about what exactly the author does or feels. The purpose of an email appears as part of the controlling idea.

So, now let’s move on to our second topic which is email-text development. As the name suggests, the development is the part of the email where you actually develop the purpose of your message in detail. The best way to organize your email text development is by asking WH questions about the topic. Let’s look at the following email.

In this email, the second sentence answers the question, how often will I be sending catalogs?

And the question for third sentence would be, what is the most important part of our catalog to our customers?

So, now you know that in order to write a clear and effective email development, you can plan your email text by writing down the WH questions. It is an excellent organization strategy and it will give you some time to consider what questions you should try to answer in your development.

Now it is time to introduce you to the conclusion. The conclusion of an email text normally appears is one sentence. And it’s content is normally a show of appreciation or positivity. Expressing these ideas involves choosing from a list of verbs that are helpful to make these ideas clear. Let’s talk about them separately.

First, to write a show of appreciation, you need to use verbs and phrases that express gratitude.

These include words like thank, appreciate, or the phrase be glad about. These words help the email text end on a positive tone, which helps our reader have an optimistic impression of your email.

The conclusion, in this email, shows a clear example of how to show appreciation.

In this case, the word thank was used. But if you’d rather use a positive wish, the most common verbs are hope, wish, and the phrase look forward to. For example, this example uses the verb hope. This verb is very positive and helps you build a relationship with the reader. It’s also possible to combine a show of appreciation and positivity with the same conclusion. Being optimistic is an important aspect of American culture, so including these verbs demonstrates cultural confidence which can help your reader have a positive view of you. Let’s recap. In this particular video, we’ve covered the main components of an email text.

We talked about the introduction which should include a clear author and the controlling idea. The development, which should consist of answers to WH questions. And the conclusion, which should include words of appreciation. In the next modules, we’re going to look at emails used for specific business purposes. We’re going to show what the most common types of emails are and specific language to use for each type. So that you can achieve your business goals with even more precision and effectiveness. I’ll see you in our next module.