Intro
1. Learn Vocabulary - Learn some new vocabulary before you start the lesson.
2. Read and Prepare - Read the introduction and prepare to hear the audio.
hey,
when u write emails do you bother to capitalize letters or punctuate correctly. since email is so new, there aren’t really standardized rules for how to format them. some people prefer to make emails relatively formal, while others, perhaps because they send so many emails each day, write them as quickly as possible.
k, listen to kevin and mason talk about how they decide how formal an email ought to be.
thx,
ebaby
Dialog
1. Listen and Read - Listen to the audio and read the dialog at the same time.
2. Study - Read the dialog again to see how the vocab words are used.
Kevin |
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Kevin: So you know I teach at the university, and when my students email me, I notice such a range of ways in which they write emails.
Mason: But you’re teaching English, right?
Kevin: I teach Spanish.
Mason: Oh you’re teaching Spanish, so you’re dealing with English speaking kids writing emails.
Kevin: Correct.
Mason: Really? And there’s a lot of different style to it?
Kevin: Some are very friendly. Of course they call me Kevin, which is totally fine. They say, “Hey Kevin” and, you know, to me, anytime I write an email to, well, almost anyone, I would write their name and have a salutation at the end.
Mason: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kevin: But a lot of people just don’t do that. I get “Hey,” and no name at the end. It’s unbelievable.
Mason: You know, well now that I think about it, people that I write a lot of emails to, like my coworkers, who I email maybe 10 times a day, we kind of do away with all formalities.
Kevin: Fair enough, fair enough.
Mason: It’s more or less like a text message.
Kevin: No capital letters?
Mason: Well, I’ll capitalize sentences. I mean, I respect sentence structure. I don’t abbreviate words. There’s no lol, bff sort of stuff. But you know, I won’t be as formal.
Kevin: That’s tricky.
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Discussion
As a professor at the university, Kevin gets quite a few emails from his students, and he says that they come in a range of formats. Mason initially thinks that the wide variance is because Kevin is teaching English to people who don’t fully know the language. But Kevin reminds him that he teaches Spanish, so most of his students are native English speakers.
It’s okay with Kevin that his students use a friendly tone in their emails. He lets them call him by his first name anyway. But it does bother him that sometimes his students don’t address him by name at all when they email him and that they often don’t sign their messages.
Mason says that when he sends emails to his coworkers, who he emails many times each day, there is almost no formality. He says the emails are almost like text messages. Kevin asks if Mason capitalizes and he says he does and that he doesn’t use Internet abbreviations either.
How do you usually format emails? Do you write them differently depending on who you’re sending them to?
Comments
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Saudi Arabia |
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Ghana |
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United States |
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China |
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India |
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Brazil |
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China |
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Moldova, Republic Of |
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United States |
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Brazil |
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Italy |
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Italy |
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India |
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China |
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Iran, Islamic Republic Of |
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China |
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Afghanistan |
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Afghanistan |
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India |
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China |
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