How to Write Professional Emails, Reports and Proposals

In the previous session, you got an understanding of the basics elements of good writing. In this session, you will apply these elements to fine-tune and make your professional writing highly effective.

Before you begin with this session, we have a quick pre-read for you. Do let us know about your thoughts on the same in the discussion forum. 

The corporate world relies heavily on three types of communication, which are as follows: 

• Emails
• Reports 
• Proposals

The two main considerations for any corporate document that you frame are:

• The people it will be reaching to, and
• The outcome you expect out of the people it reaches to.

With this in mind, any email, report or summary that you write should have the perfect skeleton to base your message on.

Let's watch the first video as Rakesh outlines the main elements of an email:

Let’s quickly summarise the main elements of an email and their significance in the corporate world, along with some best practices that you can follow for each element:

1. Subject: The subject line of your email is the first point of contact between you and the recipient. Therefore, the subject line should be as clear, concise and captivating as possible.
2. Body: ‘Dear’, ‘Hi’ and ‘Hello’ are acceptable forms of opening remarks for professional writing. The main body of the email consists of three parts if you are using a three-paragraph email structure. Note that there are email structures that you can use. 
3. Signature: The signature should contain your contact details for future correspondence, and any relevant links, to your website or LinkedIn profile. 

Let’s watch the next video to learn about another type of communication in the corporate world: Report.

Reports are more often than not long documents that generally require a lot of time and effort to read as well as write. For this very reason, most of the reports that you write will not be read in their entirety. That’s why a summary is very important. This is because anyone going through your report will first look at the summary to get a gist of what is covered in your report.

The summary of a report consists of many elements. However, it mainly aims to answer the following questions:

• What is the report about?
• What is its objective?
• Who is the audience?
• What is the problem the report is solving?
• What are the recommendations of the report?

Your summary should provide an overview of everything the report is trying to accomplish.

Now, let’s take a look at the different elements of a report that were covered in the previous video. A report consists of the following elements:

• Cover page
• Index
• Summary
• Body
• Bibliography
• Appendix

Let’s watch the next video to understand the format for proposals:

Let’s quickly summarise what a typical proposal covers.

A proposal should provide detailed answers to the following questions:

• Who are you?
• What are you proposing?
• Why are you to be agreed with?
• What can you provide on acceptance of the proposal?

Now, let's quickly understand the key focus areas of the three mediums of corporate communication:

In the next segment, you will understand what to write and what to avoid while creating professional documents.

Additional resources:

• The Ultimate Business-Writing Checklist