Cambridge B1 Preliminary (PET): How to Write an Email

if you are interested in how to write a really really good email in b1 preliminary you need to keep watching hi and welcome to teacher film where i help people like you pass their cambridge exams make sure you subscribe to the channel and like the video and also check out the full article the link is in the description box below and with all that being said let's get started emails are the only mandatory task in b1 preliminary writing that means you don't have a choice you have to write an email as you will see however writing a good email is really a lot easier than you might think also you have to write around a hundred words but i always tell my students to write a little bit more than 100 words so between 100 and 120 is usually a good idea to be on the safe side you usually write an email in b1 preliminary to a friend or teacher or another person that you know in every task you get the context of the email that you have to write as well as the person you are writing to and four content points that you need to address in your text you need to be familiar with the right language to address these different content points for example you have to know how to start and end an email but you also have to be able to show how to agree or disagree with something how to give your opinion how to suggest things how to apologize or how to explain something these are just some examples and there might be other functions that you have to fulfill in your email but let's have a look at an example in a little bit more detail so when you write an email for b1 preliminary there are three main areas that you always need to keep in mind first of all you have to choose the correct layout for an email that means there needs to be a clear beginning and ending and you need to address all the different topic points in the task second of all as i've just mentioned before you also need to use the right language in order to address the different content points and last but not least you also need to use the right style of language in an email that is normally neutral english to informal english but we will talk about that a little bit more in a second instead of just sitting down and starting to write your email it makes a lot of sense to first of all look at the task and analyze it carefully if you invest just two minutes you get a lot of information that can help you when you start writing and it can also save you a lot of time later because once you get into time trouble it is always good to have a plan with all the information you need so here is an example task for an email in b1 preliminary when you look at it at first it might be a little bit confusing but if you look at it with a system and if you ask the right questions there shouldn't be any problem at all the first thing you should always find out in your task analysis is the topic of your email the topic can help you choose some nice words and expressions that you could include in your email looking back at our example task we can see that your teacher wants to organize a party at the end of the school year now that we know the topic of the email we need to look at what exactly we have to include and this is where we need to look at these different content points they give us the details that we need to fill our email with the most important information so let's have a look again at the example task from before you can see that there are the four topic or content points on the side of your teacher's email and there are only some little notes that are connected to the text with straight lines the four content points in our example are that you need to show that you think it's great that there's a party you have to explain if you prefer the party to be in the classroom or if you would like to go to the park you also need to suggest some activities and last but not least you should tell your teacher about food you would like to eat at the party the third and last question of every good task analysis is to check who's going to read your email as i've mentioned earlier emails in b1 preliminary are usually written to your teacher or a friend or some other person that you know so that means that you don't have to use formal language you already know the person so you don't have to be too polite so in most emails we can use neutral or informal language and you have to check which one is the best option in each individual task here because we are writing to our teacher we shouldn't make it too informal and keep it more on the neutral side once we finish our task analysis and we have all the information we need the last thing to get ready is to think about the structure of our email luckily every email in b1 preliminary looks exactly the same we start the text with an opening formula after which we address the different content points and at the end of our email we also write a closing formula you might think now okay that all sounds nice and quite easy but what exactly is an opening formula and a closing formula and how can i write a good topic paragraph so that's what we're going to look at next let's have a look at an example email in detail and let's go through it step by step together let's start at the beginning every good email starts with some kind of greeting and an opening formula here we simply want to say hello to the person we're writing to but once again we need to be careful if we have to use an informal opening or maybe something that is a little bit more neutral or formal if you want to write to a friend we can choose something informal for example we could say hi phil however if you remember in our example we write to our teacher mrs lake so we should be a little bit more respectful and formal so a good option to do that would be to say something like dear mrs lake yeah this is nice and respectful and not too informal so it's perfect for our email next we are going to write our topic paragraphs the topic paragraphs are the most important parts of your email because they contain the different content points from the task each topic paragraph can be only one or two sentences they don't have to be long because remember you only write between 100 and 120 words in total which means that you don't have a lot of words available for each of these topic paragraphs you also need to be careful that you use the right functional language in each of these paragraphs to show the examiner that you understand exactly what you have to do with each of the content points so let's look at an example email that i've written for this specific task you can see the rather formal greeting at the top where i say dear mrs slake and then you can see my four topic paragraphs in each paragraph i use specific language to express exactly what the task asks me to do you can see the language in the different colored boxes in the text you can also see that each topic paragraph is basically just one sentence once again we don't have that many words to spare so we try to get to the point as quickly as possible and keep our sentences nice and short like the ones in my example last but not least we want to end our email with a nice closing formula here we can write one final sentence where we end the email in a nice way and then we use some kind of salutation in the end to say goodbye once again all we need to do is to be careful with formal neutral and informal language so we make sure that we show the person the right level of respect so here you can see that my example is not too formal but it is also not completely informal i didn't use any slang words the only thing i did was to say thanks again and see you in class phil you see how easy it can be to write a good email for the b1 preliminary writing exam every email works more or less in the same way simply remember that you can always use the same structure as in the example and you just need to be careful with the right functional language as well as the most appropriate style formal neutral or informal thank you very much for watching the video as i mentioned at the beginning you can check out the full article in the description box below where there is a long list of useful language and functional language that you can use in your own writing please also check out my other services that you can find on my website and don't forget to follow me on social media so take care and i'll see you next time

Channel: Teacher Phill

Views: 6,171

Keywords:

Id: toy8CB50_1o

Length: 12min 32sec (752 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021