ESL Writing Activity: E-Mail Rules

Many of my students will soon graduate from university. So, finding a job is important. Many ESL students want to find employment with a company that does international work, or work for a foreign company. In either case, these students will most certainly need to communicate via email with international people.

Unfortunately, many students do not know how to send a proper business e-mail. By proper, I mean an e-mail message that conforms to ideas of proper layout and content. They do not know how to write an effective email that gets attention and prompts people to take action.

ESL Lesson: Writing E-mails

That is the purpose of this lesson: how to write a proper English-language e-mail message. This lesson has two parts. First, review the notes in the slide show presented below.

Second, review the e-mail samples in this pdf file. This file contains several real emails from hotels companies  It also shows common errors which do not always make a good impression on the reader.

By the end of this lesson, my ESL students should know the basic parts of an email message and the importance of style and layout.

Writing Activity

Here is the writing activity. Write an email to a hotel. Use the information we studied in this lesson to create a proper e-mail message.

Your purpose is to ask for information about room rates and availability for a specific date.