How to Structure a Professional Email

Another email addict getting things done

Emails are a necessary evil of modern business life. You might decide to quit Facebook or Twitter a few times a year, but emails are the “I just can’t quit you” of communication.

They can be formal, informal, long, short, scheduled, immediate, ignored and deleted! We want to help you with your English, but also with your email prowess.

Today, we are sharing a little email structuring tip for our students. This might be particularly helpful if you have “service users” (i.e. people who you provide a service to, which can include people in your team).

SIPA those emails!

Our simple structure looks like this:

Salutation
Identify (the issues)
Propose (solution)
Ask (for response)

We’re not going to cover writing good “subject headings” here — that’s for another day!

Salutations

Saying “hello” is easy! It’s “goodbyes” that are hard. Your salutation may start, “Dear Julia” but it can get a little awkward if the exchange goes back and forth for a while. If your email exchange continues over a few days on the same subject, try being time specific: “Good morning Julia” is polite but not as formal.

Identify

Summarise the issues as you understand them or from what you have been told. Avoid lengthy paragraphs as they are hard to deciper.

Here’s some corporate guff (from this awesome jargon-generator):

The key items discussed yesterday gave us a way forward. Leverage agile frameworks to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews. Iterative approaches to corporate strategy foster collaborative thinking to further the overall value proposition. Organically grow the holistic world view of disruptive innovation via workplace diversity and empowerment.

It would be better to present the same information like this:

The key items discussed yesterday were:

- Leveraging agile frameworks
- Iterative approaches to corporate strategy
- Organically growing the holistic world view of disruptive innovation

This will allow us to provide a robust synopsis for high level overviews and foster collaborative thinking to further the overall value proposition via workplace diversity and empowerment.

(How does that actually sound like a real email when it is actual computer generated nonsense!)

Propose

Your service user may have to make many decisions each day. Make their life easier by proposing one for them; together with some alternatives if you can. As a bonus, set out the “if-this-then-that” (otherwise known as consequences) for each proposal.

Ask

After setting all of this out so well, the final request should be simple. If it’s time sensitive, then say so!

Please let me know by 4pm tomorrow how you’d like to proceed. If I haven’t heard from you by then, I’ll call to confirm before 5pm.

That’s it for now, we’ll let you get back to your emails.

We’ll be adding to this series over time, so be sure to follow us here and across social media. It’s always @beschoolenglish.