Musings from the Email Writing Workshop
By Swapneel Desai
If anyone had to ask you to go for an email writing program, your answer would probably be: “I don’t think I need a course on email writing! I write pretty good emails”.
Professionals often don’t see email writing as a skill that can be learned and mastered or as a medium of communication that has many aspects to it. More often than not, it is seen as a way to document information or simply get the message across.
On 24th February 2018, EnglishCoach conducted an open workshop on email writing, titled Email Writing for Professionals. It was our first open workshop and it was a whole new experience for us.
The event began with the participants getting to know each other. We had participants from different professions like marketing, management, sales, and HR. This gave us insight into the wide range of emails they write and the challenges they face when trying to get the message across. So, there was a lot to “troubleshoot”!
Writing emails is not as easy as it may appear. When one learns of the dos and don’ts of email writing, you identify the practices that have been missing and why it’s often difficult for the reader to understand your email.
Getting the message across is not the only objective of writing emails. The subject line, the structure of your email, and tone & style play a major role in how your reader perceives your email and, hence, perceives you. An error in placing a punctuation mark can change the meaning of a sentence, completely confusing the reader. Getting your tone right is a difficult task. The wrong tone can set a bad impression and lead to a soured relationship or worse – loss of business!
While the participants at the workshop shared their scenarios and queries, the facilitator, Sharmila, CEO, EnglishCoach, helped them with solutions and that gave them a hands-on approach on how to respond to those situations. Discussions helped the group come up with frameworks on how to build rapport with the reader and becoming more aware of the reader’s needs. With the help of practice exercises participants learned how to structure their emails and how to write effective emails with confidence in different situations.
The event ended with participants reflecting on their learning and how the workshop had helped them write better emails. One of the participants shared, “I thought I was writing good emails. But, I realise that the tone in my emails may not have always been polite. I was only writing to get the job done. I was also not writing to meet the reader’s needs and my emails could have been difficult to understand. I now know how to structure my emails, so that the reader can understand what I’m trying to convey.”
To know more about our email writing program for organisations, click here.
