What are you requesting for?
The below email was sent by a conference organizer after meeting up with the professor that this email is addressed to. The purpose of the email was to remind the professor of the requests put forth during the meeting.
Note: The names and organization have been changed to ensure confidentiality
While the conference eventually turned out to be successful, with excellent feedback from the participants, this email was far from an effective piece of communication. This included the lack of correctness, coherence and clarity, among others.
Firstly, from a correctness point of view, this email was littered with grammatical errors, such as “once is confirmed” (1st sentence) and “to see if Dr Vivan interested” (Action point 2), just to name a few. While it is a student organization being represented here, the numerous errors in the email projects an unprofessional image for the organization.
From a functional point of view, the subject of the email was “Filming Interview with Minister of MCYS” when the email was supposed to remind the professor of the requests that the organization has put forth, with the interview being only one of the three requests. This might have caused the professor to overlook the other two requests when processing the email. An alternative title might have been “Requests from (Organization Name) in preparation of the Entrepreneurship Forum”
On a more positive note though, the email was rather concise, and had action items which the professor would be able to act on immediately. In addition, having just attended the meeting, the professor would have a better understanding of the details of each request than what is mentioned here.
Overall, the necessary contents of such a piece of communication is already included, but the inability to express the requests correctly and coherently might lead to others having a negative impression of the organization.
The following is how I would write the email:
Thank you, Hong Ting, for sharing this example with us. You do a very fine job of critiquing it and in providing a much-improved alternative version.
There are a couple cases of subject-verb disagreement in your own critical text though. Check these sentences: 1) “…the numerous errors in the email projects….”, 2) “…the necessary contents of such a piece of communication is already included….”. I often make similar silly mistakes in e-mail and such.
What it shows, I suppose, is that few of us write in such a way that is completely error-free.
Hey HT!
I’m pretty surprised that there’s not been much feedback from the other folk. Perhaps there’s some underlying technical error? Anyway here’s my late two cents. (Thanks for the well wishes, too! )
In the email you would have wrote, it would be nice if the author exercised a little tact in the requests 1 and 2. You could disagree and say that they are more concise, but often there needs to be a balance between being concise and being nice. (Think of this example: A military officer barking commands vs. a nice grandmother telling you a long story when you want information fast. We’ve got to be somewhere in between, and it is hard to decide where).
I would have said something like this for point 1: We have heard that Ms Chew is eloquent and fitting as a speaker in our forum. Please help us by encouraging her to be one of our three speakers.