TO: Lisa Liang, Team Writer
FROM: Jojo (Syau-jing) Huang, Team Editor
DATE: November 24, 2019
SUBJECT: Peer Review of effective email communication
Hi Lisa, thank you for submitting the Writing with YOU Attitude Memo, please see a list of comments about the memo.
Overall Impression
The sections of the memo are concise and tidy. The introduction clearly specifies the purpose of the memo, while the conclusion briefly explains the reason and importance of those tips, both of which provide a friendly atmosphere of the whole memo. At the same time, all of the tips are clearly listed as bullet items, which help the readers understand the main idea easily and leave an awesome first impression.
Tips for Writing to Professors
The lists of tips are concisely focused on the reader’s situation of requesting placement in a full course, and the total number of tips is reasonable, which makes the reader willing to accept them. At the same time, the first tip about addressing the email directly to the professor may be a little confusing to this specific target reader (Evan Crisp). Although the target reader has already addressed directly to the professor in the original email, after reading this tip, he might still assume that something about the receipting address needs to be improved and be uncertain about how to improve it. Giving a hint that this tip has already been achieved or removing this tip might reduce the confusion.
Writing Style
The body of the memo does not contain any imperative verbs and avoids the use of “you” as much as possible, which is an awesome demonstration on how to write with “YOU Attitude”. Meanwhile, reducing the usage of some remaining “your”, such as changing ” Listing your interest and academic requirements as a primary reason” to “Using the personal interest and academic requirements as a primary reason” in the third tips might make the body even more friendly to the reader.
Grammar
Overall the grammar in the memo is good, while there are some minor improvements that may be applied. For example, the first sentence of the conclusion (“As professors usually have hundreds of students to keep track of, writing emails to professors can be tricky, because not only do we have to be detailed enough for the professor to identify us, we also have to keep our message clear and concise.”) may be a little long, and the conjunction “because” in the sentence may be improper. Breaking it into two sentences similar to “As professors usually have hundreds of students to keep track of, writing emails to professors can be tricky. As a result, not only do we have to be detailed enough for the professor to identify us, we also have to keep our message clear and concise.” might make it clearer.
Overall, the memo was well written. It provides many valuable tips on writing emails to the professors, which is quite helpful to the readers. Your questions about the review comments are very welcome, please feel free to contact me at xiaojing@alumni.ubc.ca.
Link to Lisa’s post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl301-99a-2019wa/2019/11/17/writing-with-you-attitude-3/
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