Emailing at work discussion and roleplay meeting
with emailing vocabulary and advice phrases
In pairs, decide which of the following 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 you agreed on and see what the class thinks.
Ask about anything above you are not sure about, discussing if it is a good idea or not as a class each time.
Put underlined phrases above in the right places in the table on the next page, with ones with the meaning next to each other.
| Strongest positive Weakest Strongest negative |
Check as a class. Then discuss with your partner whether you would change any of the sentences above into a stronger form or into a weaker form.
Using similar language, add three new strong rules and three new weak rules to your list.
As a class or large group, 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 and email vocabulary
What do email and internet words in italics in the original sentences above mean? Do you know any other abbreviations from emails, chat rooms, texts etc?
What do these stand for and mean?
CU RU CC ASAP Btw
L8R LOL IMO IMHO FAQ
FYI ROTFL Thx TBA
Match the abbreviations above to words from here:
to be announced frequently asked questions later carbon copy thanks are you by the way see you as soon as possible in my opinion in my humble opinion for your information laughing out loud rolling on the floor laughing
What do you think about using expressions like these in business emails?
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PDF for easy saving and printing: EmailMeetingsLanguage
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