Email Tune-up 03:

External Requests

Original Email

Subject: New shipping date for P/T-008/05

Dear Simone,

Thanks for your comments of below order (P/T-008/05), It maybe tight to catch our
delivery schedule of April.

As it takes 4 days for sea freight, another 2 days for distribution, also at least one
week for us to customs clearance, so please arranged it earlier your schedule.

In order to meet our sales promotion in April, we need to receive the products in
end March, so please help us by corresponding with our supply team and check if it
is possible to ship the goods around March 16.

Awaiting your favorable reply by today.

Claudia

Revised Email

Dear Simone,

Thanks for your comments on the order below (PO/T-009/05).

It may be difficult to meet our delivery schedule for April, and in order to meet our
sales target for that month, we need to receive the products by the end of March.

As it takes four days for sea freight, another two days for distribution, and at least
one week for customs clearance, we would like you to ship the goods on March 16.
An early shipment will allow us to meet customer expectations and generate more
sales in the future.

We would appreciate it if you can help us by corresponding with our supply team
and checking if it is possible to ship the goods on March 16.

I look forward to your reply.

Regards,

Claudia

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 ET 03 – E xternal Requests

Transcript

Welcome to another installment of Email Tune-up, the Business English Pod

program that lets you submit your own business emails for an online video review.
You can submit your own emails by visiting the website and clicking the link next to
this video.

What we have here is an email from Claudia, who works for a wholesale business,
to Simone, who works for one of her suppliers. Claudia wants to make a request to
Simone for an order to be shipped earlier, so that she can deliver the products to
her customers on time.

All right. Before we start making any changes, it’s a good idea to think about what
Claudia wants this email to accomplish. She’s making a request to Simone to speed
up the shipment of an order, and she wants the email to be as effective as possible
in getting Simone to cooperate.

A good request email will usually have four basic parts:

• Background: explain the situation behind the email

• Request: tell the reader what you want him or her to do
• Motivation: explain to the reader why he or she will benefit from fulfilling the
request
• Action: remind the reader what action you’d like him or her to take

This structure is going to be useful to keep in mind when we examine the style of
the email. But before we do that, let’s clean up a few problems with mechanics.
That means grammar, spelling and punctuation.

Mechanics

In the first paragraph, Claudia should be referring to Simone’s comments on the

order, not of the order. As we go through the email, we’ll see that Claudia has a
few problems with prepositions, and this is just the first one.

Now in the second sentence of this paragraph, may be should be two separate
words when it’s used as a modal verb, the way it is here.. And we have one more
problem with prepositions. Instead of saying the delivery schedule of April, we
should say for April.

In the second paragraph, you’ll notice that we have a couple of numbers: 4 days
and 2 days. In English, we normally want to write out any number less than 10. So
let’s change this to four and two. We also need to change this also to and, so that
the three phrases in this sentence are parallel.

In the second half of this sentence we need to correct the verb tense of arranged so
it becomes please arrange. Finally, we need to add another preposition here, so the
phrase becomes earlier in your schedule.

In the third paragraph, the prepositional phrase in end March should be by the end
of March.
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 ET 03 – E xternal Requests

Let’s take a close look at the verb forms in the second half of this sentence. Claudia
says “please help us by corresponding with our supply team and check if it is
possible to ship the goods around March 16.” These two verbs, correspond and
check, should both be in the –ing form, because they form part of a clause with the
main verb, help. So instead of check we should have checking.

Style

Now let’s take a look at the style of this email. Remember the four-part structure
we discussed for request emails: background, request, motivation and action. We
need to figure out if Claudia has included all four of these elements in her email,
and also whether she’s put them in the right order.

If you look at the first paragraph, you’ll see that Claudia begins with an
introductory sentence reminding Simone of which order she wants to discuss. The
second sentence is the background sentence: it explains to Simone why she wants
to discuss this particular order.

So I think we should break the introductory sentence out into a separate

paragraph, because it can stand on its own. And it’s followed by the background
paragraph, giving the reason for the request.

Notice that way down in the fourth paragraph, we have another sentence that gives
more of the background that Simone needs to know. This is information that should
go at the top of the email, so I’m going to cut this sentence out and move it to the
background paragraph. And we need to add a full stop here.

Now that we have our background paragraph, let’s make a few vocabulary changes
so that the language sounds more appropriate. Claudia says, it may be tight to
meet our delivery schedule. I’m going to change tight to difficult. Tight is an
idiomatic English term meaning ‘not much time’, and that informal style isn’t
appropriate for a business email.

And in the next sentence, I think sales promotion isn’t exactly what Claudia wants
to say. She means the sales target for April. And since we’ve already used the word
April in this first sentence, we don’t need to use it again. Let’s take out this phrase
in April and substitute for that month. And notice that we are also correcting a
preposition here: instead of in, we have for.

So we have two sentences giving Simone the background to Claudia’s request. To

make the paragraph flow more smoothly, we can connect the two sentences with
and, and we need to make this a small I since the two sentences express related
ideas.

The third paragraph is the request paragraph, where Claudia is asking Simone to do
something. She wants Simone to speed up the shipment of the order. But look at
what she says when she actually makes the request: she says so please arrange it
earlier in your schedule. This doesn’t give Simone a very clear idea of what Claudia
wants her to do.

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 ET 03 – E xternal Requests

We already know from looking at the last paragraph that Claudia wants the goods
to be shipped around March 16. So let’s take that information and move it up to the
end of the request paragraph, so that Simone knows exactly what she needs to do.
We can say: We would like you to ship the goods by March 16.

You can see that even though Claudia has used a polite verb form here, we would
like, she’s also being very clear and direct. So when Simone reads this paragraph,
she’ll know exactly what Claudia wants from her.

Remember, the third element of our request email should be motivation. Whenever
you can, you want to give your reader a reason to do what you’re asking. You
should explain why he or she will benefit by cooperating with you.

In this case, let’s remember that Simone is Claudia’s supplier. So the sales that
Claudia makes to her retail customers are also sales for Simone. So let’s add a
motivation sentence to this paragraph reminding Simone of why she should help
Claudia. Let’s say An early shipment will allow us to meet customer expectations
and generate more sales in future.

See what we’ve done here? We’ve added a sentence that connects the success of
Claudia’s business to the success of Simone’s business, and gives Simon a reason
to cooperate.

This final paragraph should be our action paragraph, where Claudia reminds Simone
of what she’s asking her to do. Let’s first take out this so, so the first sentence
begins Please help us. And since we want to keep our request clear and direct, let’s
take out the word around and replace it with by March 16, so that Simone has a
very specific target date for making this shipment.

Tone

Finally, let’s go back to the beginning and review the tone of this email.

For the most part, the tone is already pretty good. I can see only a few things that
Claudia might want to change.

First, let’s look at the two phrases in the email where Claudia asks Simone to do
something. These are the initial request, we would like you to ship the goods by
March 16, and the repeat request, please help us by corresponding with our supply
team.

The first request uses an indirect verb form and is very polite, but the repeat
request may be a little too direct. We can make it less direct and more polite by
changing it to We would appreciate it if you can help us by corresponding with our
supply term. So we’ve used would, a modal verb, to soften the language of the
request.

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 ET 03 – E xternal Requests

We also need to do something about the closing salutation, Awaiting your favorable
reply by today. This is not a good way to close the email. It suggests that Claudia
expects an immediate reply and that she expects Simone to agree with her request.
Those are expectations you shouldn’t express directly, because you want to
maintain a sense of cooperation with your reader.

If Claudia wants Simone to make a speedy reply, she can express that desire
indirectly by adding a new closing paragraph: I look forward to your reply. And then
we can change the closing salutation to something more neutral, like Regards.

Well, I think that just about covers all the changes we need to make to Claudia’s
email. We’ve made it clearer, more effective, and more polite, all at the same time.

Let’s give it one final read-through and then click send to get the email off to
Simone.

Learning Point – Phrases for Making Requests

You can use these example sentence ‘starters’ to make requests:

Formal/External Emails

 Please could you …

 I would be grateful if you could…
 We would like you to …
 We would appreciate it if you can …

Neutral/Internal Emails

 Please let me have …

 Could you … ?
 Can I have … ?
 I’d appreciate your help with …
 I wonder if you could …?

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