Hello, and welcome to our lecture on effective e-mailing. Now, let's say you are a manager of a company and you receive an email from someone with a subject line and an email address like this. Notice who the email is from? AvengersIsAwesome@gmail.com. And notice the Subject line? It's pretty informal, most managers would not be impressed. By the end of this video, you will be able to use proper formatting for effective emails, use appropriate subject lines for effective emails, and use appropriate language. Okay, generally we should think about business emails falling into two categories. There are internal emails, where you're emailing staff, colleagues, and management. And external emails, where you're emailing clients, companies, or organizations. The general formatting concepts should remain the same for both. Now, at the macro level of emailing, you need to think about whether the message is for external or internal audiences. What your business situation is. And whether or not there are any cross-cultural issues. We'll discuss more about these things in future lectures and in a future course within this specialization. At the micro level, you should be concerned about the structure, the content, and the directness or politeness of the language in your email. Again, we will discuss these points in further detail in another lecture in this lesson. But for now, let's take a look at a brief example of what would happen in an internal email. Quite often, the language in an internal email might look similar like a conversation or spoken language. This may be because an email is actually a follow-up to a phone conversation or a meeting. So keep that in mind. Sometimes an email is an extension of a previous verbal conversation. The basic format of emails will include a To line and possibly a CC line or a BCC line, if you want to email others and for them to see the message. Your email will also include a From line. Now going back to our example at the beginning of this lecture, I want to remind you that the email address used by the sender is not appropriate. Businesses and particularly managers who are hiring, may not look at your email seriously when an email address looks like that. So you need to make sure that your email simply contains your name and is professional. Okay, remember the other problem with the email at the beginning was its Subject line. You should make sure that your Subject line is clear and concise. Now, generally, your email text will include a greeting, the body, and some sort of closing line or a signature block. One important thing to remember, and before I continue, is that business emails should not include emoticons. These appear to be unprofessional, and they can easily get misinterpreted. Now you may think it's funny that I'm mentioning this, but you would be surprised. I've seen emoticons in some professional emails. They're not appropriate. Right, let's go back to the language of the body. We'll go into more detail in the next few lectures and readings. However, for now, it's important to note that you should be concerned about the content of your message, your basic business situation. You should be aware of how direct your language is. And how aware you are of your audiences' needs or values. What is your relationship with the reader? Paragraphing and sentence length in emails tends to be short. In today's world, people get a lot of emails. You don't wantna flood an email with a lot of unnecessary content, it will only add to people's workload. You should also be aware of how you use uppercase and lowercase. A good general rule is that you should not use all uppercases in any message. It will appear as though you are shouting at the reader. You should also avoid overusing acronyms. They can slow down the reading, and confuse readers if they do not know what the acronym is used for. Okay, so in this lecture, we briefly discussed the general rules for formatting emails, how to write effective subject lines, and the appropriate language used in emails. Please continue to the lessons in this module to learn more details about the style and tone of language in effective emails. Thank you for watching.
