10 Tips to Effectively Communicate via Email

This is for all those who, at some stage or the other, will need to communicate with the people from the schools that they are applying for admission to. –

Please, please, please be careful when you send emails etc. to the graduate school, international office, current students, alumni, professors when exploring about different things.

Everyone’s time is valuable, and they cannot (and they shouldn’t) afford to spend it just trying to understand what you are trying to ask/tell them.

• How Not to Write your Name in Email
• How to Write your Name in Email

Here are a few pointers:

1. Do not use the short hand that you’d use when you send text messages to your friends via cell phones.
2. Try to be as clear as you can be when you put together an email.
3.  If you have more than one issue to discuss, be very clear about it.
4. Follow all the rules of sentence syntax, grammar, punctuation that you followed when you were writing for your GRE/TOEFL essays.
5. Keep it formal – use salutations with last names (e.g. Dr. Nichols, Prof. Hathaway, Ms. Saunders, Mr. Brzezinski etc. etc.).
6. State the purpose of your email very clearly in the opening paragraph. In fact, the more specific you can make your emails’ subject, the better.
7. Try not have a very long body of the email.
8. If needed and if it suits, use numbered points to ask your questions or make comments.
9. End your email by thanking them for their time, and close your email formally as well – i.e. Yours Sincerely
10. If you need to, mention the resources from the university’s website that you’ve already explored. So they don’t need to refer you to those resources yet again – that way you’ll save your time and effort, as well as theirs.

While applying for jobs, its far more important to use email in right way using email.

Do you have additional tips to share about email communication?

 

See Next –  How Not to Look like an Idiot When Communicating via Email