Welcome to email tune up, the video pod cast to help you improve your business writing.
Let me just remind you that you can submit your own emails by visiting the website and clicking the link next to this video.
What we have here is an email from Claudia who works for a wholesale business to Simone who works from one of her suppliers. Claudia wants to make a request to Simone for an order to be shipped earlier, so that she can deliver the products to her customers on time. Before we start making any changes, it’s a good idea to think about what Claudia wants this email to accomplish. She’s making a request to Simone to speed up the shipment of an order. A good request email we usually have four basic parts:
1) Background - explain the situation behind the email.
2) Request – tell the reader what you want him or her to do.
3) Motivation – explain to the reader why he or she will benefit from fulfilling the request.
4) Action – remind the reader what action you like him or her to take.
This structure is going to be useful to keep in mind when we examine the style of the email. But before we do that, let’s clean up a few problems with mechanics. That means grammar, spelling, and punctuation. As we’re limited to just 10 minutes on You Tube, I’m going to quickly bring up a new screen showing all of Claudia’s problems with mechanics. You can visit the website at www.businessenglishpod.com to view the full version of this video, including detailed explanations of our corrections to Claudia’s email.
Now, let’s take a look at the style of this email. Remember the 4 part structure we discussed for request emails: background, request, motivation, and action. We need to figure out if Claudia has included all four of these elements in her email, and also whether she’s put them in the right order. If you look at the first paragraph, you’ll see that Claudia begins with an introductory sentence, reminding Simone which order she wants to discuss. The second sentence is the background sentence. It explains to Simone why she wants to discuss this particular order. So, I think we should break the introductory sentence out into a separate paragraph, because it could stand on its own. And it’s followed by the background paragraph, giving the reason for the request. Notice that way down on the fourth paragraph, we have another sentence that gives more of the background that Simone needs to know. This is information that she go at the top of the email.
So I’m going to cut this sentence out, and move it to the background paragraph. Let’s make a few vocabulary changes, so that the language sounds more appropriate. Claudia says, “It maybe tight to meet our delivery schedule.” I’m going to change tight to difficult. Tight is an idiomatic English term, meaning not much time, and that informal style isn’t appropriate for business email. And in the next sentence, I think sales promotion isn’t exactly what Claudia wants to say. She means “the sales target for April.” And since we’ve already used the word April in this first sentence, we don’t need to use it again. We can change this to “for that month.” And notice that we were also correcting a preposition here. Instead of “in” we have “for”. So we have two sentences giving Simone the background to Claudia’s request. To make the paragraph flow more smoothly, we can connect the two sentences with “and” and we need to make this a small “i” since the two sentences express related ideas.
The third paragraph is the request paragraph where Claudia is asking Simone to do something. She wants Simone to speed up the shipment of the order, but look at what she says when she actually makes the request, she says “So please arrange it earlier in your schedule.” This doesn’t give Simone a very clear idea of what Claudia wants her to do. We already know from looking at the last paragraph that Claudia wants the goods to be shipped around March 16th. So let’s take that information and move it up to the end of the request paragraph, so that Simone knows exactly what she needs to do, we can say “We would like you to ship the goods by March 16th.” You can see that even though Claudia has used a polite verb form here “We would like” she’s also being clear and direct. So when Simone reads this paragraph, she’ll know exactly what Claudia wants from her.
Remember, the third element of our request email should be motivation. Whenever you can, you want to give your reader reason to do what you’re asking. You should explain why he or she would benefit by cooperating with you. In this case let’s remember that Simone is Claudia’s supplier, so the sales that Claudia makes to her retail customers are also sales for Simone. So let’s add a motivation sentence to this paragraph reminding Simone of why she should help Claudia. Let’s say “An early shipment will allow us to meet customer expectations and generate more sales in future.” See what we’ve done here? We’ve added a sentence that connects the success of Claudia’s business to the success of Simone’s business, and gives Simone a reason to cooperate.
The final paragraph should be our action paragraph where Claudia reminds Simone of what she’s asking her to do. Let’s first take out this “so”, so the first sentence begins “Please help us.” And since we want to keep our request clear and direct, let’s take out the word around and replace it with “by March 16th. Finally, let’s go back to the beginning and review the tone of this email. For the most part, the tone is already pretty good. I can see only a few things that Claudia might want to change. First, let’s look at the two phrases in the email where Claudia asks Simone to do something, these are the initial request, “We would like you to ship the goods by March 16th.” And repeat request, “Please help us by corresponding with our supply team.” The first request uses an indirect verb form and is very polite. But the repeat request maybe a little too direct. We can make it less direct and more polite by changing it to, “We would appreciate it if you can help us by corresponding with our supply team.” So we’ve use “would” a mode over to soften the language of the request.
We also need to do something about the closing salutation, “Awaiting your favorable reply by today.” This is not a good way to close the email. It suggests that Claudia expects an immediate reply and that she expects Simone to agree to her request. Those are expectations you shouldn’t express directly because you want to maintain a sense of cooperation with your reader. If Claudia wants Simone to make a speedy reply, she can express that desire indirectly by adding a new closing paragraph, “I look forward to your reply.” And then we can change the closing salutation to something more neutral like “regards.”
Well I think that about covers all the changes we need to make to Claudia’s email. We’ve made it clear, more effective and more polite, all at the same time. So let’s give it one final read through, and then click send to get the email off to Simone.
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