Using Upper Case Letters in Emails

Many of my adult ESL students want to improve their business ESL skills. This includes speaking and writing skills for a specific purpose.

Writing effective emails is one of top priorities for most of my students. As I've mentioned before, we often review emails they've written in the past week and make corrections. I don't only look at grammar issues, but just as important, we review the "tone" of the emails.

One of the things I rarely have had to mention to my ESL students is how WRITING IN ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (OR UPPER CASE LETTERS) is equivalent to shouting or yelling at someone. If you're teaching business ESL for emails, I'd recommend mentioning this to students just in case.

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English for Love or Money

I've had a lot of young adult ESL students in the past few years. Many have been working towards advanced degrees in business. I've had a good number of CPAs and aspiring CPAs and other business majors. I ask them about how they came to their career decisions. Most have very logical reasons, primarily around making money and creating a good life for their future families.

I'm currently working with a PhD student. She's working on a PhD in business. She used to work as a CPA in Korea. Now she wants to become a professor. She's in her early 30s. She told me today about how she really did not like being a CPA. She didn't care for the business world, but she didn't really feel there were any alternatives.

I think that for people from many countries outside of the U.S., there seems to be fewer options. I think that Americans are becoming more comfortable with non-money making alternatives for careers, and are desiring more to be "happy" in other ways. Maybe that will be one of our future exports.

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Subject Lines for Business Emails

One aspect of business English that I teach my adult ESL students is how to write effective emails. In addition to the regular challenges of writing business emails, my students also have to learn about the tone of an email. This is actually important for all email writers, especially when writing business emails.

Another thing that I believe is very important is an effective "subject" heading. The subject heading should be succinct and convey the main topic of the email. The reader should be able to look at the subject line and decide if the email is of interest.

One mistake that many people make, not just ESL learners, is to send an email by hitting the "reply" button from an old message, but not changing the subject line. For example, I may have received an email from an ESL student with the subject heading "My writing sample." I respond to the student about the writing sample (no need to change the subject heading here), but then the student uses this email and simply hits "reply" (without changing the subject line), the next time that he or she wants to contact me. However, the subject of the new email might be a schedule change. In this case, the subject line should be changed to "Schedule change" or other some related phrase.

Always using a subject line that is related to the topic of the current email is good business sense and is one component of a good business email.

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Providing Added Value to ESL Students

A number of my private ESL students are working professionals. Many of them want to improve the tone of their writing, especially in emails. We often review their "sent" emails in class.

However, sometimes my ESL students need to send particularly important emails before we have a chance to review them in class. I offer to review and edit such emails for my students free of charge. This doesn't take too much time for me and it delivers a valuable service to my ESL students.

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Effectiveness of ESL Tutoring

I met with two ESL students today for private lessons. Today was one of those days where I doubted my effectiveness as a tutor. I have been working with one of today's English language learners for several months. He is mostly working on his business English skills. He is making a lot of progress, especially in the area of writing effective emails. During our sessions, he takes notes of the mistakes he has made and the improvements we make to his writings. He then studies these notes between our sessions and applies what he has learned.

I have been working for only a few weeks with the other student. Unfortunately, I don't feel like he is making any improvement. Of course, we have only met a total of six times, so I should probably allow more time for an assessment. However, I still doubted my effectiveness and the choices I was making for lesson plans.

I have to remind myself that I am only in control of the lesson plans that I make and the job I do of teaching. Learning a new language is something that cannot be done in only one or two lessons per week. Ultimately, it's the student's responsibility to learn what is being taught.

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Business Emails for ESL Students

Many of my ESL students live and work in the U.S. Their English skills are proficient, however, they want to specifically improve their business English skills. Among these skills is writing effective business emails. While their grammar and vocabulary may be alright, it’s the tone of the emails that most ESL speakers need to improve.

Finding the right tone is difficult even for native-English speakers. Most of us have learned that playful sarcasm does not come across well in a two-dimensional email. We’ve had to learn to deal with this form of communication to effectively communicate our ideas or to get what we want. For an ESL speaker, finding the right tone is even more difficult. The nuances of the language are difficult to discern.

The way that I help ESL speakers to write more effective emails is to review their emails in class with them. I explain the feeling that their emails convey and confirm whether this is what they intended. I also ask them what the relationship is with the person they are emailing. Sometimes, if their English is not very advanced, I may have to ask what the main point is that they are trying to communicate.

After discussing the meaning, feeling, relationship, etc., of the email, I then show alternative ways to write the email. We usually review a week’s worth of emails (usually about two pages) in one session. I recommend that the ESL student then make notes of phrases or expressions that we’ve used on their own, so that they may use them in future emails. In future classes, we again review the previous week’s emails to look for uses of what we’ve already studied and also to look for new challenges.

BTW Happy Cinco de Mayo!

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