Improve your writing skills. Write effective emails including great subject lines, greetings, and closings. You’ll be more confident as you communicate for business, send messages, expand your network, and search for jobs in English.

Effective writing is an important business skill, especially for networking, and most communication takes place using email.

In this course, you’ll learnimportant vocabulary and strategies for writing effective emails, starting with the subject line. You’ll learn how to write messages for different audiences and understand when tobe formal or direct.You’llalso learn how your choice of words can change the way people view your message.You’ll practice writing emails to follow up with people in your network.

  • Institution: UWashingtonX
  • Subject: Language
  • Prerequisites:

    Intermediate level of English language proficiency.

  • Language: English
  • Video Transcript: English
  • Create and use email messages, including greetings, body of message, format, and closing
  • Use appropriate tone and formality in your emails
  • Use email to invite a person in your network to meet with you
  • Write follow-up emails

Week 1:Subject Lines & Openings
This week you’ll learn the parts of an effective subject line and know what common mistakes to avoid. You’ll also know how to using greetings like “Dear” and when to use titles or first names.

Week 2: Tone: When to be Formal or Direct
This week introduces the idea of tone. The words you use and the way you say it make your writing more or less formal and more or less direct. You need to make choices about these things depending on who you are writing to.

Week 3:Effective Beginnings and Endings
The first and last lines of an email are super important to success. We’ll point out how to write good openings and closings and provide useful vocabulary for these parts. We’ll also practice the language of making arrangements to meet.

Week 4:Writing Follow Up Emails
In the final week of the course, you’ll lookspecifically at the language of following up. This is an important step in making your network bigger.You’ll practice writing your own email and get feedback from your fellow classmates.

“The videos were informative and useful to a great extent. Also the vocabulary and summary given on the videos were clear and precise, to understand the important aspects to write a proper and effective email.” – Previous Learner


Daphne Mackey
Instructor at University of Washington


Richard Moore
Instructor at University of Washington