20 Useful Work E-mail Phrases (Advanced English)

hey guys it's Courtney back from Wonder in English and for today's video lesson we're going to talk about all of the useful email phrases that I use when I'm writing work emails I'm going to give you guys 20 useful email phrases that I use on a weekly if not daily basis we're gonna talk about how to apologize to someone via email how to ask for help how to blame someone politely and other things so let's get started so things that I like to mention at the beginning of the email are normally about their quickness to reply and about referencing something that we've discussed previously so the two useful phrases I'll give you to start off your emails are as we discuss I'm writing to send you so you can say whatever verb or phrase you want after but as we discussed or as discussed prior these are ways that we start off an email to indicate that we've previously talked about something and we're bringing it up again in this email so another useful phrase I like to use is thank you for your quick reply or thanks for getting back to me so quickly because people can be quite slow over email it's nice to encourage and reward the people that do reply to you quickly so this is a great way to do that and to use that in the very beginning of the email to set a good rapport between the two of you if you're asking for help within your email which oftentimes we are it's really great to ask them if that works for them so useful phrase that I like to use often is please let me know if that works for you so maybe you're trying to schedule something with someone or you're asking them for help and you're asking them a specific question and to do something and you're giving guidelines and you want their feedback you want them to yes I can do this for you yes that works for me yes his time scheduled is perfect so asking for their response is really important in the email please let me know if that works for you another great phrase to ask for help would be to say any assistance you could give me in this matter would be greatly appreciated so there are obviously variations of this but you're just asking for assistance and you're saying it would be appreciated so you're basically saying please help me but I'm not going to assume that you're going to help me that's why we're using wood because conditionals are a lot more polite when asking for something so there are unfortunately a lot of times in which we have to apologize via email maybe you messed up maybe you missed something that you scheduled or you decided not to hire somebody and you kind of made them think that maybe they would be hired a lot can happen a lot of miscommunication can happen so the greatest way to deal with that is to be very kind in your apology my recommendation would be to say please accept our apologies for any inconvenience this caused you so in english we'd love to apologize for any inconvenience this means that it could have wasted their time it could have confused them it could have just set them back in some way so anytime you might have inconvenienced someone you should recognize that so you're saying that you caused an inconvenience and honestly I like to apologize twice in an email so if I say I'm sorry for this then I will say again once again at the very end of the email please accept my apologies for the inconvenience if you need to delay or postpone something or give someone bad news a great way to do this is to use the word afraid so for example you could say I apologize but I'm afraid we're going to have to reschedule or unfortunately I'm fraid we're going to have to reschedule so you're not actually afraid but this is some word that we use in English when we want to show that we're not happy about it and we're sorry and it's unfortunate and I really didn't want that to happen but it did so I'm sorry and this is what the result is another great way to apologize is to actually thank somebody for being patient or thank them for understanding so I read a really great quote about this on Instagram that said instead of apologizing for being late thank the person for waiting for you and I really liked that and that's actually something that we use in our emails as well so you could say thank you so much for your patience while we sort this thing out so you're thanking them recognizing that it's a delay and in that you're kind of apologizing for the fact that there is a delay however often times you might not want to apologize because something that you really can't help it's out of your control and so this is an instance in which you would want to use this type of sentence if somebody's asking for your help and you're really not able to aid them then something that you could say is sorry I couldn't be more help this is the kind of phrase that we would use in order to indicate I want to help you but I can't I'm sorry continuing on with the help theme anytime you're asking for a request and you want it to be done quickly but not to put too much pressure on that person a really great phrase would be to ask them to do it at their earliest convenience meaning I want it done as quickly as you can possibly do it but I don't want to you to you know prioritize this over other tasks that are equally important so can you please do this at your earliest convenience that's a very polite way of asking as soon as possible please if you want to be extremely polite when asking for a request it's important that you use specific language so here are two phrases in order to be polite when asking for something you could say would you mind sending me this document would you mind doing this for me so you're asking if they would mind your asking if they would care rather than just demanding that they do it or immediately requesting that they do it or you could say I was wondering if you could or I was wondering if you would be able to do something I was wondering I was just thinking about it I'm not straight-out asking you and I'm also pairing the wondering with words like could or would so these are both conditionals and we use conditionals to be more polite so I was wondering if you could please turn the air down that's a really polite way of saying turn the air down so emails often tend to have attachments on them so whenever you want to send somebody a document that is an attachment there are various ways that you can reference this in your email for example you could say for your reference please see the attached document or you can just say I have attached such-and-such document if it's not actually attached but it's written within the body of the email and you're just copying and pasting it then you're going to reference it by saying the information below for example I send out tons of emails for recruiting and the job description is below so I'll write them a personal email and then I'll say please see the information below regarding the job description or please see the job description below unfortunately sometimes when I'm recruiting we can't accept all of the applicants that are applying for the job so if you have to decline somebody a great way to do this is to say that we regret to inform you that your application has been done so this is a phrase that we tend to use very often when it comes to applications for things for example if you're going to college and they don't want to accept you or admit you into that college they would write something like that but you can also use it for any other kind of scenario in which someone is trying to pursue something and you're not accepting them so we regret to inform you I don't know okay my favorite technique is next and I think it's quite helpful blaming someone via email telling them they did something wrong is difficult to do if it's not your first language so I think that I approach this in a really good way that allows a person to go back and revise or fix what they've done and recognize that there was something wrong but not actually take offense and you know be irritated with me so a great technique that I like to do is called the sandwich technique so this is something that we do a lot in English where we'll start off with a compliment and say hey you did this really well then you'll put in the negative comment but there was an error on page three section seven and then you add another little bottom of the bread with a compliment saying thank you so much you've been working so hard and I really appreciate your effort so using that sandwich technique the negative comment is sandwiched between two compliments it's a great way to psychologically prepare the person to hear this negative feedback that they need to address another great technique with this is to use the passive voice so you don't want to say you did this you want to say a mistake was made notice how there is no subject there we don't know who made the mistake that's the kind of language we want to use we don't want to point fingers and say hey you did that but we want to say that there was a mistake made by someone and keep it very vague keep it ambiguous so right now I'm gonna do an example that I wrote out that I would include in an email if it was needed so first I would say thank you so much for your work on this project compliment then I would say unfortunately it seems like there was a miscommunication notice here how I'm not saying it seems like we miss communicated it seems like you didn't understand me I said it seems like there was a miscommunication there's no blame there the current price does not represent what was previously discussed and our budget does not align with a new price point is it possible to discuss this further thank you again for all your hard work I really appreciate your effort and cooperativeness so the compliment goes at the end but did you notice that other piece of language there where I didn't use them specifically as a subject I said the current price does not represent what was previously discussed what was previously discussed I didn't say what we previously discussed I didn't say what you told me before but that's basically what I'm saying I'm saying you told me this price was the one that we were going with and now you completely changed it but I'm doing it in such a nice way that now we can have a conversation and address the issue so being able to blame someone very politely is a great way to address the issues and get what you need done but still have a strong relationship with the people that you're talking to all right so the very last two phrases are to sign off or to say goodbye and the email and these are some of my favorite the very first one I use all the time when I'm working with people because I want to give them a chance to ask me questions any any any time if anything is confusing for them I want them to feel comfortable to come to me at any point so what I say to them is please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions don't hesitate meaning I don't want them to to feel uncomfortable talking to me if they ever have a doubt of whether or not they should I'm saying go ahead and do it so it's just a really polite way to say I'm here for you and I actually care what you have to say if you have a question and if you plan on talking to them again you should say I'm looking forward to hearing from you soon or I look forward to hearing from you soon so I know that my students right this'll phrase a lot but they actually tend to write it incorrectly so pay very close attention to the two forms that I used I am looking forward to hearing from you shortly or soon or I look forward to hearing from you shortly so these are the two ways that you can use it and not any other ways so be careful with how you're using your ing verbs in the sentence all right guys I hope that that was helpful for you guys and now you can go out and write a ton of emails to all the people that you talked to I hope you guys have a really great day don't forget to Like subscribe and hit that notification bell so you can get new videos to your YouTube page every single week also guys if you haven't already check out my podcast on Wonder in English comm it's a really great tool to learn new vocabulary because I have a transcript of the podcast and define all the challenging idioms and words for you so you can listen and read along and learn a ton of new vocab and also just hear about really interesting topics so I hope you guys have a really beautiful day thank you so much bye [Music] you

Channel: Wonder in English Courtney

Views: 106,322

Keywords: English, ESL, Advanced English, English as a second language, english conversation, english writing, english reading, english for foreigners, english in the united states, American english, english work emails, work email phrases, english useful phrases, useful phrases for emails, 20 useful work email phrases, wonder in english, how to write an email in english, write english email, english email vocab, how to write an email in english formal

Id: c8yvN5oOKHY

Length: 15min 10sec (910 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 14 2019