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Roleplay meeting on the topic of emailing
emailing/ meetings/ abbreviations/ advice, suggestions and recommendations
In pairs, decide which of these rules you think would be good to have in your company
- It is generally best to CC your boss into all messages
- Under no circumstances must you send personal emails from work
- Please make a habit of pasting all documents into the body of the email as well as attaching them
- Please make sure you report anyone in the office who is forwarding joke emails
- We recommend you avoid opening all attachments
- You might find it is a good idea to write and spell check your emails in Word and then paste them into your email later
- It is company policy to be careful with spelling and punctuation even in short, informal emails
- We strongly recommend that you use clear paragraphs (one topic per paragraph)
- Try to avoid using short forms and abbreviations (CU, RU etc.) in any emails
- The best method of dealing with junk mail is to set your protection on ‘high’ and check your trashcan for emails that are not junk once every couple of days
- For security and privacy reasons, it is not permitted to copy your work emails onto flash drives, floppy disks etc.
- Deleting work emails is not allowed
- We suggest keeping all emails short
- As some people who read our emails are not native speakers, you should make an effort to use simple language
- Please try your best to keep all sentences short and avoid complicated forms to understand, like passives
- Please be sparing with the use of emoticons
- You might find it better to avoid words in your subject line like “money” and “hi”, as these are often used in junk mails and people tend to delete them without reading them
- It is vital that you remember to copy all messages into the ‘sent’ folder
- Please make an effort to write interesting subject lines that will get people’s attention
- Ideally, an email should be no more than 5 sentences long.
- Without fail, quote back. This will ensure that the person you are replying to remembers what you are talking about.
- If you don’t have time to reply to an email straight away it is sometimes worth sending a quick acknowledgment, saying you will deal with it later.
When your teacher stops you, share one rule you agreed was good and see what the class thinks.
Ask about anything above which you are not sure about, discussing if it is a good rule or not each time.
Would you make any of the recommendations stronger or weaker (while still basically agreeing)?
Put the underlined phrases above into order of strength, from strongest to weakest. Some may be equal.
| Strongest positive advice Weak positive advice Weak negative advice Strongest negative advice |
Compare as a class. Some rankings are debateable, so please check if you wrote something different.
Discuss with your partner whether you would change any of the sentences into a stronger or weaker form.
Using this or similar language, add three new rules to your list
Change groups. In groups of at least three, choose a chair and hold a meeting to decide a ten point list of rules and guidance for the use of email in your company.
Email abbreviations
What do email and internet words in italics in the original sentences mean? Do you know any of the other short forms and abbreviations that could be used in emails and chat?
How about these?
CU RU CC
ASAP Btw L8R
LOL IMO IMHO
FAQ FYI ROTFL
Thx TBA
Match the short forms and abbreviations above to words from here:
- announced
- are
- arranged
- as
- asked
- be
- by
- carbon
- copy
- floor
- for
- frequently
- humble
- in
- information
- later
- laughing
- loud
- my
- on
- opinion
- out
- possible
- questions
- rolling
- see
- soon
- thanks
- the
- to
- way
- you
- your
What do you think about using expressions like these in business emails?
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