Conversational E-mail

In secondary school, we were taught how to write proper business letters. We started with "Dear Sir", inserted a subject, and began our text writing, “Enclosed herewith please find…” or “With regards to the aforementioned subject…”

We memorized lists of businesslike terms that would make the writing sound official and learned to write formatted sentences that would work well in almost any business letter we wrote, including our closing sentence, “Should you have any enquiries, please do not hesitate to contact the undersigned.”

Years ago, business writers had time to craft beautiful business letters and business readers had time to savor them. This is no longer true. Most of our business messages today are short and to the point. We send them over e-mail rather than through the post. E-mail readers prefer brief, clear messages, so e-mail writers can communicate best with a brief, simple and polite style.

The overall tone of a business e-mail is conversational. In other words, the tone you’d use to discuss the message face-to-face with your recipient will be the same tone you'd use in your e-mail. This doesn’t mean that you’ll write exactly as you talk, but that the level of formality in your e-mail will be equal to that of your conversation. For example, you would write to your managers as you would normally converse with them; you’d write to your suppliers as you normally talk with them.

Official language has its place in our business communications, but in our business e-mail messages, it’s a conversational tone that gets the business done.