Cambly Live – Part 2: Dos & Don'ts of Business English: Best Practices

hello everyone hello hi hello everyone can you see me can you hear me hello I hope everyone's doing well it's great to be with you all here today all right I'm excited to see everyone so if you can he if you can see me or if you can hear me please type in the chat uh let me know while you're out there uh let me know where you're from uh I would love to know you know I was thinking I want to know what is your favorite dessert what is your favorite dessert to eat I really enjoy eating ice cream that is my favorite dessert I love ice cream what's yours what's your favorite dessert where are you from all right let's see who we have here today all right we got to move from Ireland great Sri Lanka hello Brazil wonderful all right it's great to see everyone here today I hope you're all doing well uh it is a nice morning here uh in the United States where I am uh it's it's pretty early it's about 9 00 a.m let's see what else do we have oh we have brownies are your favorite I love brownies that's great we have Sri Lanka wonderful all right hello from India great it's I love seeing everyone from all over the world you know coming here together and uh learning a little bit about English it's great all right we have a turkey great Pakistan wonderful South Korea but live in Albert um Alberta that's great Canada excellent all right hello from Nepal wonderful it's great to see everyone here today we have people from all over the world that's wonderful all right holy just a couple wait a minute or two more to let some more people join and then we'll go ahead and get started all right hello from Somalia hello that's exciting let's see all right oh no well I'm sorry to hear that uh hopefully hopefully you can uh you know find a little Joy today and um and and some English lessons all right all right hello from Sweden excellent oh great all right well it is great to see everyone here today hello Brazil all right so ice cream aside uh my name is tutor or teacher Greg um I'm a tutor here on cambly I've done many of these live lessons and I am excited to do another one here today uh for all of you so today we are going to talk about business English but we're going to specifically focus on the writing aspect so a couple of weeks ago I did a different lesson on business English and talking about the you know professionalism and speaking and everything about uh you know kind of how you conduct yourself in business so if you'd like to watch that one you can go ahead and uh go to the Campbell YouTube channel and we can uh and that that video is all loaded there and we have lots of other videos uploaded uh for you know pretty much every topic we could think of to cover um and we're still doing more every single week just like this video so if you are linked to this video or if you have to leave and you want to go back and re-watch it uh this will be posted to the cambly YouTube channel uh directly after the videos ended so uh do not fret if uh if you have to leave early we will be able to re-watch the video so uh it is great to see you all here today I'm very excited I'm going to move this a little bit closer here today all right there we go let's make sure we can all see this so when talking about business writing so there's a very specific type of way that we write in English uh that we make sure um especially in our business way right so we have two different kinds right there's literary writing and then there's business writing so a lot of what we talk about when we talk about writing is literary writing so this is you know much more it's eloquent it uses big words tells a story right we think about books we think about fiction um this is our type of literary writing so I also wanted to highlight the word eloquent years because that's a bit more of a higher vocabulary word so eloquent means something that sounds very nice something that sounds pretty and and well written that's eloquent so literary writing can be said to be eloquent okay however business writing on the other hand the goal is to convey information quickly with very few words and it's going to be direct and formal okay we want to make sure that we're not adding in extra words we want to be as to the point as possible unlike literary writing where we want to make it sound pretty we wanted to make it flow that's not what we're looking for in business writing we're looking for concise statements because the person you're writing for right does not want to read a lot of words we want to read as few words as possible especially at work we're busy we want to go you know leave work and go do the other fun things that we have going on in our lives so that's why I want to keep it short and concise so that's what we're looking for when we talk about business writing versus literary writing okay so there are three main types of business writing that we do there's the formal work product which are the things that you're going to turn into your boss or you're going to provide to a customer this is your formal work product then there's email which is both of you at both General email and formal email an email is by far the most common way we're going to communicate right a lot of us are in business uh and and we noticed that we we use emails to communicate just about everything unless we're doing our formal word product and then there's also chat applications especially in business English and I'm sure all over the world a lot of people use chat applications right slack jabber teams how many on here have used uh jabber or slack or teams how many have used the chat applications before is anyone anyone out there use these chat applications hmm I know personally I've used slack a lot uh let's see is anyone does anyone else uh have any chat applications that they use let's see teams excellent so that people have teams at work very good all right yeah so those are very popular very popular they use these different types of chat applications teams all right all right so for those of you who have not used these before they are just different ways that you can type and talk with your colleagues and the people you work with uh to uh you know convey information for each other but it's generally very informal right it's informal conversation you're not going to be uh doing too much uh actual right here's here's what you're not going to be giving work product over that right sometimes you talk with your boss at a time okay so let's talk about some of the do's and don'ts we do with uh with business English especially in our writing okay so the first thing we want to do is we want to make sure we know our audience right and this is it's very important to know who are you talking to right who are you talking to and why okay so you want to know the type of information you're conveying right are you writing a memo are you writing a letter are you writing an email right this is really important to know who your audience is right who is the person are you writing it to your boss are you writing it to your co-worker right is this an internal message or is this an external message okay so that's that's very important because you want to know who you're writing to influences how you write right we also want to know are we writing persuasively or are we writing informative okay so it's going to be different if you're writing persuasively you're going to make sure that your writing to convince someone of your topic right that's going to be a different style of writing than it is to be informative informative you're just letting them know information that about whatever it is the topic that you're writing on right and this will change a lot just depending on who or what you're writing for and what your job is right an engineer is going to write very differently than an attorney so ah yes so these should not be used in exams no that's a great question no so this is this is not exam writing this is just more for your everyday business writing especially if you're working with uh American uh people uh American colleagues so know your topic right you want to be clear with what you're writing about and why you're writing it right you want to be very quick and clear about that because people don't have a lot of time and if you're not clear with what you're going to write often people will stop reading it and you want to make sure that they read all the way through what it is you're writing and you're very clear about it you don't want any confusion or uh to be hiding anything a very common business term is called hiding the ball and you don't want to do that you'll be very clear with what you're talking about all right and you want to be concise okay you want to make sure when you're writing a very concise about what it is that you're writing about right that kind of goes back to uh knowing your topic right knowing your audience being very concise and making sure that you're not uh you know wandering through uh what your uh actual writing is going to be okay you want to make it easy to read format is very important uh for business writing especially uh for a lot of English business writing right you should be a very specific type of format that people are using depending on uh what it is that you're writing and we'll go through some email formats uh a little bit later because that's the most common and uh and easiest to talk about because it's hard to say we don't know um it's hard to say whether uh what thing and what your job is uh the different types of writings like memos and uh you know blue sheets and things like that so uh oh is there a problem can can we hear me is everyone can still hear me let's see I see there might be some problems uh with the voice can everyone still hear me all right excellent okay good you can still hear me that's great okay so we'll keep going here so then last and most important most important thing about business English is proofread okay proofreading is very important grammar mistakes uh punctuation spelling those are really important to make sure we avoid those because that is one of the number one way that people will discredit right they will make they will need your information and think that it is you know potentially wrong or uh they won't think that it is important as it is if there are no mistakes so that is the number one thing all through school every time I work make sure you proofread right have your grammar write your punctuation right and your spelling right an important thing that I always do whenever and this goes for exams as well if you are writing it save time at the end after it's done written to go back through and re-read everything and make sure that you have the right punctuation spelling and grammar okay because that's that's one of the things that a lot of people Overlook because they've written it and it's done and they don't think anything more about it but you need to make sure that you do okay so if you don't some of the don'ts that we do in business English all right we want to avoid figurative language right we don't want to use metaphors or similes or scene setting right those are really nice when we're reading or when we're writing uh a book or a short story right but not for business English so for example if we were to write you know our third quarter profits are as steady as the flowing river right when we write this in an email to our colleague it sounds very nice right it sounds very nice however we don't want to add things like that because it's not and it's not direct right we're not conveying the message as quickly as possible so instead we would want to say something like third quarter profits were steady right we just want to say exactly what it is third quarter profits were steady we don't want to add in right a simile like like the flowing river right that's good that's exactly what we want to do keep it very steady right third quarter profits were safe very good okay so another thing we want to do is we want to avoid passive voice so we talked before right so uh tutor Nicole had a whole lesson on passive voice and active voice and we want to make sure we avoid that right it's not direct it sounds less confident so when you use passive voice in your writing it makes it sound like you're pushing off right whatever type of uh responsibility it is so we want to make sure we're not using passive voice so for example right we can say the budget was overrun in September by the engineering team okay the budget was overrun in September by the engineering team so this is passive voice right because we have the subject right of the action first and then we have the subject who's doing the action last so we want to switch that right we want to switch that we want to say the engineering team overran in September right the engineering team overran in September that is how we want to do our active voice right the engineering team's doing the action and it's happening right it's we're over running it so that's how we wanted to make sure we're writing very direct very active voice because it makes us seem more confident and it makes it seem like we know what we're talking about because we do right when you're writing something you do know what you're talking about so it's very good all right we have a question in here so contractions so uh there is not a problem with contractions um you can you can use them um in emails usually when you're using your work product it depends on what you're writing for um but contractions are not uh a problem generally uh to write especially in your emails because it usually emails are a little less formal than your work product although sometimes an email will be your work product so I think you're okay to use contractions um it's more formal to not use them so you'll never you will never have an issue if you don't use a contraction so it went in doubt I would say try not to don't use them uh but if you know that it's not a problem then you're more than you're that shouldn't be a problem um for like a lot of technical writing or if you're doing any type of like writing for universities or research those are not uh you don't use contractions for that so uh if you're writing a contract you don't use contractions so good question very good question okay so another thing we want to avoid is long run on sentences okay long run on sentences right where we don't have our punctuation uh we want to avoid that so for example right I have thought long and hard about our about our marketing strategy and I feel as though we should move to a Target or move to Target a more youthful audience okay so I have thought long and hard this is a very long sentence right there's no punctuation in here this is not the type of writing that you want to do you want to make this much shorter and much more to the point right it doesn't really matter how long you thought about it right it doesn't really matter like uh you know whether we have a more uh right you're you feel as though we don't it doesn't matter whether you feel that or whether you think about that right we want to take thoughts and feelings out of business writing right we want to make this more direct and say right we should pivot our marketing strategy to Target a younger audience right it's direct it's to the point you don't want to think about what you're feeling you don't want to think about you know what are we thinking about we want to be direct right we should pivot our marketing strategy to Target a younger audience it's much more direct and it's much more to the point and that and that is the type of writing that we're looking to do in business writing okay very good all right so another thing we want to avoid right is industry jargon okay and jargon uh I don't know if we've heard that word before but jargon those are words used in a specific industry or in a specific Department of a company okay that's jargon and it depends on where you're working and what you're doing as of what type of jargon that you use so often we're talking about acronyms or we're talking about technical words um so something in email right like uh send that back to me ASAP right well we don't want to use acronyms as much especially in more formal writing we want to say something like could you please talk to me as soon as you can or when you have a chance right that's going to be much more uh useful and especially if you have a lot of acronyms in the type of work that you do uh like if you're an engineer or if you are working with it that kind of thing you want to make sure that you are excuse me you want to make sure that you are using less of those terms and spelling out what they mean right because a lot of times especially if you're sending an email to someone that is not in your department you don't know they won't know what you're talking about so very good okay oh and I did see the question there acronym or contractions yes so contractions are like don't and uh I've right it has that little apostrophe over the top that's a great question let's see if I have an acronym written out here I don't know that I do but an acronym is is going to be a little uh it'll have a little contraction over the top right like this one like don't that's a contraction of do not great question okay and I believe that there is a Camry live lesson all about contractions as well if you want to go back and take a look at that on the camera YouTube channel Okay so we talked about some of the do's and don'ts here right of our business English so the most common and by far the easiest to talk about because we don't know uh what type of job everyone's doing is email right we do know everyone's going to write emails in business English right everyone's going to write emails so let's talk a little bit about emails so in English we have several common email introductions okay so when you're sending your email and the first thing you write in your email right we usually say something like Dear Mr Adams okay or if you don't know who you're talking to you can say to whom it may concern okay that's very formal but if you're sending an email to someone say you're applying for a job or you are sending asking a question to someone but you don't know the person or who you're talking to you can say to whom it may concern okay you can always just say dear Ms or Mr if you don't know who you're talking to as well right we know we're going to be sending it to someone so you can say dear Ms mister and then start your email okay if you do know the person very well right you can do an informal one and say John okay you can just start your email with John because that's the first name of the person exactly hi John you can start with hi John that's exactly right or we can say dear Chris okay so this is the more and this is a more informal but it's still more formal than the first one like hi John or John right this is this is the most common right dear Chris or dear uh Dear Mr Adams those are the most common dear Greg right exactly so that would be that is the most common one um but these are all very common uh email introductions and it has any type you want right you can have very formal to whom it may concern or dear Ms or mister or you can do more informal John or uh or hi John right I like that one a lot I'm gonna put that on there because that's also very common right you can just say hi John and from there right that is very common we'll we'll just say hi John and start uh and start the email after that so great suggestion okay so these are a very common email introductions okay we've got formal informal so we'll go ahead and put that over here okay so common email introductions so we also have very common ways that we start emails okay very common ways to start an email so first we could do a very inform you can do very formal way right we can say hello my name is Greg I am writing I'm writing you because right why are we writing them we always want to State especially at the beginning of an email um if we don't know the or if we don't know the person we want to introduce ourselves hello my name is Greg right and you want to say why you're writing them because a lot a lot of people get a lot of emails I'm sure all of you get lots of emails and especially in English writing business English people and they don't know what the email is about they will just ignore it right it's easy to ignore an email but if you say right away introduce yourself and say why you're writing they're much more likely to answer okay so this one might be something like to whom it may concern hello my name is Greg I am writing because I have a question or I I uh I need some information right so that's gonna be very common okay another one is uh you could start you know dear Chris I hope you I hope uh this email finds you well right I hope this email finds you well is also very common you want to you can start with some sort of uh you know kind introduction hoping you know everyone's doing well so right I hope this email finds you well or um I uh I hope uh I I hope you are doing great um that kind of thing is is usually very common in business English is to give them some sort of a Kind introduction another one that people do often is acknowledging a holiday or event so if it is a holiday right you could say I hope you had a great holiday weekend or I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family so Thanksgiving was just happened here in America a very common holiday that people are not at work for right they have the day off usually for that so coming back in you can say uh you know hello uh Happy Thanksgiving or I hope you had a great Thanksgiving that's very common right acknowledging an event um it's a very common and easier way to introduce your email okay rather than starting directly into what you want so you do want to be direct and concise but with an email we often begin with something that is a little bit more indirect and ease into the email okay and then last right we can State a known connection so you know if you know some if you know something about this person right or you know uh someone who knows that person you can start with that like hello my name is Greg I got your information from Chris right we can say that right I got your information from Chris and that is stating a known connection and very common especially in English like American English if you know someone they're gonna much more likely to talk to you right you if you know the person so that's why we State a known connection it's very common okay so let's put that one up there so that's starting an email so we have our introductions we have our introductions we have how we start an email so let's talk about our sign offs real quick so a sign off right is how we say how we end our email not in the words but who it's from so this is very common right we sign off with sincerely okay sincerely Greg you write your whole email and you say sincerely Greg or thank you right because thank you Greg that's very common right uh this is formal this is somewhat formal best right it's very informal but also very common right you just write best with a comma and then your name right best Greg okay or regards this is very formal or cheers very informal okay so this these are all these are all common sign offs right sincerely thank you best but they they range in their formalities sincerely in regards are far more formal and you should send you should sign off your emails with these or best regards if you can say best regards that is far more if you're if you don't know the person or if it is someone maybe outside of your uh very common work you would say sincerely or regards okay because you want to make sure that you're being very much more formal with business English especially someone you don't know if you know the person really well you can say thank you or best or cheers uh and then your name sometimes if it's very informal um what you will just do sometimes is you'll put a little Dash and you'll just put your names and you'll just sign off that way and you'll just say Greg at the bottom of the email however that's there that's the most informal and usually only used if you have been talking with the person for a while are you sending emails back and forth so if you if you generally in the first email you send uh in in in uh to someone you will always have a sign off if you've emailed the person a couple of times and you're in the email thread you don't necessarily need to do a sign off but or for an introduction so if you've been e-9 for a while no introduction no sign off but if it's your first time in business English we will always do a sign off and always do an introduction because that's just how we that's the formalities of how we write in business English so make sure you know uh when you're emailing the person who your email who you're emailing and uh and make sure you know how how you're setting it up okay that's all very important and uh I see on their Facebook yeah you can say Faithfully absolutely that's uh um that's not as a very it's a very common one but that's definitely one that can be used as a sign off okay we'll put this up a little bit higher so we can see that all right so now the body of your email right just starting your email that will change right this will change depending on uh who when you're writing okay and who you're writing to that's why it's always important to know your audience so let's look at an example of an email Okay so if we have right dear Ms Halls okay so we're a little bit we're right in the middle right it's it's informal it's not formal but it's not informal right we're just we know this person Dear Miss Halls okay say I hope this email finds you well so we start with right where we start with something I hope they're finding them well okay uh I need the uh fourth quarter Revenue to finish my reports will you please send me the numbers as soon as you can okay will you please send me the number as soon as you can thank you Greg so this is a much more formal email right you're asking for something from someone so you you we start quickly though right we start with something a little bit softer right I hope this email finds you well we don't just say dear Ms Hall I need the fourth quarter numbers okay because we want to make sure that we're being a little bit gentler as we start in for an Ask especially when we're asking for something from someone okay and we have our thank you right we have our sign off we could have just said uh sincerely or regards right but since we're asking for something we generally end with thank you because we're thanking them for whatever it is they're hopefully going to be giving us in the future so introduction we have our our next start and then we have our end thank you all right so if we have a little bit of a less formal email we may say something like John start with John is the meeting still on for today I have the presentation slides best gray this is a very informal email we're starting with the person's name we're just starting with John right we have uh best right uh we're signing off with just our easy name and we start immediately into the question so this is likely someone that we work with a lot and likely someone that we're always doing work with Okay this is this makes it it's much more informal okay very good so this is this is an informal email versus our much more formal email but notice both of them are concise and they're to the point we write we don't have passive voice we're making it very easy to read and uh we need to proofread okay make sure we always proofread so let's try something all right if we have if we have a person we're writing an email too okay and their name is Seth Thomas okay for writing email to Seth Thomas what is the formal way how would you write a how would you start right how would we introduce a formal email to Seth Thomas how would we start that how would we write a formal how do you start a formal email what is our introduction hmm let's see so we know the person right we know their name we know their name is Seth Thomas so how would we start that okay good so we have deer we have dear Seth Thomas okay so we we we generally right we generally wouldn't use that first thing to begin with right so dear good Dear Mr Thomas Yes Dear Mr Thomas yeah so we would we would Dear Mr Thomas that is that's right that's our formal way right we would say Dear Mr Thomas okay Dear Mr Thomas because we want to we we know we know who they are right and we would just say we would just say Mr Thomas very good very good so because we wouldn't we we don't we don't want to use their first name too often because we generally that's generally more informal so how are we write an informal way though so if we know if we know who they are how would we write it informal informal introduction what would we say for an informal introduction here Seth Thomas it's informal we know them and we've emailed them a couple of times good yes dear Steph Okay so so the this is a little bit confusing because their first name is Seth and their last name is Thomas right so and especially American Business English we would just use the first name I see that's confusing though because Thomas is usually a first name as well but sometimes it's elastic it's a very common last name so we would say right we would say uh dear Seth or Seth or hi Seth very good Dear Santa hi set very good very good so we're just going to be much more informal here much more informal we're going to just use their first name or say hi or say dear but with their first name very good and yes uh so it's confusing a lot of times in in uh especially in the United States we have first things last names this is what we call them so they have a last name that sounds like a first name very good okay so let's say let's say let's try another one let's say we're sending an email we don't know who we don't know who we're sending email to because we don't know who's receiving it we know why we're sending the email but let's say we uh we're we're sending email maybe asking if they have job openings right maybe we're seeing because we want to get a new job so we know we're sending it to the human resources department okay we know we're sending to the human resources department but we don't know who is going to get it how how would we start this email how would we start this email if we don't know who it is going to over here how would we start this because unlike the last one right we know we knew the person's name was Seth you knew the person's name was Seth but we have no we don't know who this is going to but we want to make sure it's nice and polite because we want a job right we're hoping to get a job so good to whom it may concern very good that's who I'm seeing to whom it may concern so that's very good that's exactly right because we want to make sure we don't know who but we know it's concerning someone right to whom it may concern or we could say Dear Mr or Miss Right Dear Mr Miz we don't we don't know who it is and we know someone's gonna get it or since we know we're sending it to an HR department we could say dear HR department or dear human resources very good most common is to whom it may concern right because we know that it's going to somewhat right we want to make sure that we're still being polite and kind in our email introduction very good okay so this is now two or two may concern or dear Miser Mist very good okay so remember with your introductions and especially with your sign-offs make sure if you like so for this one right if we're sending it to HR department we would want to say sincerely or uh regards right we would that's what we would want to say at the very end would be much more formal about it all right so let's take a look again add an email right I talked about proofreading and I want to make sure we all know proofreading is so important so let's take a look at this email and let's look at some of the things we can change about this email so let's first read it okay I am writing to discuss the meeting last Friday we talked about getting new desks for the third floor two options and need your opinion which to pick please look at the attached and let me know my deepest thank you Greg okay so this email conveys information right we know what it's about but there's several errors in this email there's several errors in this email so can anyone can anyone give me an example of one of the errors what's one of the errors you see in this email how can we make this email better hmm uh oh I answer that question yes you can start you can start with to a hiring manager good question all right good so I'm saying first one Friday right Friday this needs to be capitalized right we don't have a capital f there right that's an easy easy mistake that'll happen getting right getting is missing a g getting is missing a g very good okay we gotta make sure these are very easy very easy uh questions right and and getting is usually a slang term right and we don't want to use slang in our business emails very good so make sure we capitalize Friday make sure we add the G okay so and what else do we have all right attached yes we're missing a t here right we're missing a t and attached right very easy easy mistake that we can make especially when we're typing or typing quickly yes no introduction yes very good right no introduction who this is not clearly not an email that we've sent multiple times so we need an introduction here very good intro we need an introduction here very good okay which word should have be capitalized okay well we always need to make sure that our proper nouns right are Friday or September things like that those are always capitalized and always the first the first uh letter or the first word after a period that's always got to be capitalized okay um and someone's name someone's name is always capitalized all right so let's see is there anything else we have here is there anything else we have here well let's my deepest thank you right that's it's a little bit it's a little bit over the top right it's a little bit over the top we don't want to say my deepest Bank use because this is just a workplace email right we wanted to say thank you or uh much appreciated something like that but my deepest thank you is too much it would it would seem a little bit odd uh in a business email like this okay so let's see is there anything else we have here right I'm writing disgusted meeting last Friday capitalize the Friday we talked about getting new desks for the third floor all right we also need a period here right we need a period here because this right it's the end of a sentence it's the end of a sentence very good and then I have two options and need your opinion which one to pick okay that's a fine that's a fine sentence there's nothing wrong with that one right we could probably make it shorter but there's nothing wrong with that okay and then uh please look at the attached right and let me know very good okay and then we could say thank you at the end right we could say thank you uh that is that that's easy right and we might we we can say thank you or uh um uh thanking you that's perfectly fine yep that's what we want to say here but my deepest thank you is too much good yes full stop we have a full stop here we got to make sure that we're putting our full stops in there okay so this is an example right of just some of the mistakes or little grammatical errors that we have to be looking for right punctuation's easy capitalization and Mis misspelled words those are some of the most common and easy mistakes to do especially uh when you're writing in a language that is not your first language so it's important to make sure we have introductions good exits right and knowing why okay good job everyone good job so let's go real quick and talk about remember right we are in our business writing we're gonna have three main types formal work products our most common email and our chat applications right these are all our formal our their most common ones we're going to have our dues right know our audience know our topic be concise make it easy to read right proofread it but don't we're going to avoid a figurative language avoid passive voice avoid long run on sentences and avoid our jargon all right so thank you so much for joining me today uh learning a little bit about business English I hope that uh it was helpful for you I hope that you're learning a little bit about writing uh if you are new to cambly we do have a promo code uh we have a go live you can use up to 36 off um of all of our subscriptions here on cambly uh there's tutors to talk with you every minute of the day morning noon or night doesn't matter what time uh it is there's someone available uh there's tutors just like me and they can help you with whether you just started English or whether you've been doing English for years and years and you're getting ready to take a big test so I uh I hope that you enjoyed this lesson um I enjoyed having with all of you um if uh you uh have if you want to go back and re-watch this one or watch any of our other videos it'll be on the candy YouTube channel um after this lesson's over so thank you so much and have a great day have a great evening have a great morning wherever it is uh where you're from thank you foreign

2022-12-10 22:23

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