Email is the primary mode of communication in businesses today. As a result, emails present the image others in the company have of you. You will be regarded as organized, careful, capable, and articulate or as disorganized, careless, incapable, and barely able to communicate depending on the quality of your emails. You can learn how to write emails that make the best impression on your readers and accomplish your goals. Clear, effective email will help you to be successful.
To make the most of your email training time and to ensure you will learn the skills you need, you must choose your email course carefully. Follow these guidelines as you evaluate email training options.
1. Choose email training that happens over time
Writing quality professional email requires learning the best practices over time. The skills cannot be taught in a one- or two-day writing workshop any more than learning to play tennis well can result from a one-day class. You must learn email-writing skills, practice them, and use them in your daily writing. The practice takes time. Then, using them in normal business writing requires that you become aware of the mistakes you were making, apply your new learning to your email writing, and make the new skills become habits in your writing over time. A one- or two-day email workshop can’t give you that growth in your ability. There are also too many skills involved in successful email writing for you to learn them in a classroom workshop.
2. Choose email training that focuses on emails you write
The research in the teaching of writing has shown repeatedly that training in a classroom setting is ineffective in teaching writing skills. Studies of college freshman writing classes show no significant improvement after an entire semester of sitting in a classroom. The reason is that learners, especially adult learners, need a focus on their individual writing rather than going through the same lessons as a class with other students. Every writer has unique needs an instructor can take care of if the instructor can go through examples of the person’s writing. Classroom teaching doesn’t allow for that individual attention.
Online learning allows time for you to write emails that show your individual needs and allows you to receive training that will help you to learn how to write high-quality professional emails.
3. Choose email training that has an instructor to provide coaching
Email training requires evaluation, feedback, and coaching by an instructor who reads your writing, comments on it, and coaches you through learning the skills the instructor has identified that you need. That takes a qualified instructor who has worked for years with businesspeople and understands what it takes for every business person to learn to write clear, effective emails.
Having an instructor work with you also ensures the instructor will notice other needs you have in your writing, such as in grammar, punctuation, spelling, word usage, or sentence structure. Training in a classroom or workshop will not identify these unique needs you have and help you learn the email skills you need to write clearly and correctly.
As you evaluate your options for email training and the email courses available, expect that you have a dedicated instructor who reads your emails, writes extensive notes, coaches you through revising the emails, and ensures you write high-quality, professional email.
4. Choose email training that has a variety of email writing exercises
To learn how to write clear, effective email, you must learn the skills and practice them in a variety of emails. Your instructor must then coach you through learning email writing skills you have not mastered. By writing a variety of emails during the training, your instructor can be sure you are able to apply the best practices to all the email you write. Writing two or three emails is not sufficient to ensure you have learned the skills.
An Effective Course in Writing Effective Workplace Email
The Business Writing Center has developed a course in writing effective workplace email based on the principles the Center knows are necessary for successful adult learners. It teaches the best practices the instructors, with over 70 years’ combined experience in training business writers, have identified from studying what makes the highest-quality, most successful email.
The Writing Effective Workplace Email course
- teaches writing at your pace, over time, so you can fit the training into your schedule and apply the skills in your daily writing
- provides lesson materials with tips, training, and a variety of examples
- contains 12 practice emails the instructor evaluates and coaches you through revising
- contains four email-writing examinations in which you write emails your instructor evaluates, then coaches you through learning any skills you haven’t demonstrated
You can read about the Writing Effective Workplace Email course at
https://businesswriting.com/courses/writing-effective-workplace-email/ 
