Today we had an eye opening lecture about writing formal emails by Dr Kathleen Mcmillan who is an academic writing advisor in our university.

I was in a blind mindset of polite email writing, until she described it as an Indian standard of writing an email. I learnt that the use of words such as "Can you kindly do...", which I wrote in almost every formal email of mine, was actually a negative way of approaching the recipient. Also the use of "Respected sir" as a salutation mark is inappropriate, as it exaggerates the plea of application, which was again used repeatedly by me in my emails. I wonder how much miscommunication I would have caused due to these minor things in my emails to the university staff, my tutors and other elder people up till now.

The lecture was quite interesting and humorous comparing emails with the other forms of communication such as telephone, text messages on a mobile or a one to one conversation. I learnt about the phrasal verbs, which must not be used in the emails and its relation to the history of German, French and Latin languages.

It was really an useful session to understand formal email writing, which is the most important way of communication in today's world.