Email Teaching Applications Keep it Formal

We are so used to firing off emails to our friends and colleagues that poor grammar, spelling and layout has become habit.

Now, I'm not knocking informal email ettiquette at all, and I'm as guilty as the rest of being very casual and relaxed in my attitude to paragraphing and using capital letters in my emails.

But this is not acceptable in an email that you send to an international school recruiter applying for a teaching position abroad. Just because you're sending an email doesn't mean that you should write like they're your best buddy. They're not. Your emails should be formal and follow the accepted letter writing rules...

Avoid using abbreviations and emoticons:

While those little winks ;) and smiles :) are cute and useful in conveying non-verbal communication clues in personal emails, they have no place in a business email.

Write formally, without contractions or short cuts. LOL, OTOH, and BTW are not appropriate in this setting, remember that you are sending a formal letter asking the recruiter to consider you for a teaching job in an international school.

This may all seem obvious to you and it certainly does to me, but I was shocked to receive an email recently from an individual that had ‘u’ instead of ‘you’. I was less than impressed.

Gettting International School Recruiters to Read Your Emails

Do you have one of those email clients that strips out the pictures automatically... for security reasons? I do, which means that any fancy colours, pictures or formatting is completely lost on me.

If international school recruiters have an email client that strips all the coding out of your emails, then your email is going to start looking very unprofessional!

So, what should you do?

Send your email messages in plain text. Keep it simple and make sure your email is sent out in plain text. Any pictures you want to send should either be left out or attached separately.

Remember, this email is the first time you will have any contact with a potential employer. You want to put your best foot forward!