Sunday, February 15, 2009

Business Correspondence Critique---Email

Dear fellow friends,

My names Mary Chia Shan Shan. The XXX Community Center (10 minutes walk from XXX MRT) will be holding a blood donation drive this coming September. Here are the details.

Blood Donation Drive 2008
Date:27th Sep 2008
Time:11am
Venue:XXX CC


If you are able to support the drive, do mark the above date of your calendar and support us, at the same time saving lives.

Here are some of the Facts:
Everyday, about 250 units of blood are required by the hospitals in Singapore for patients requiring bloodtransfusions. Unfortunately, the number of units that is being collected daily is insufficient to meet therequired needs.
Blood is needed not only to save lives in times of emergencies, it is also needed to sustain the lives ofpatients who requires regular blood transfusions at the hospitals.
Important for more healthy individuals to come forward to help save and sustain the lives of these venerable people. For this blood donation drive, we are appealing to all healthy individual between the ages of 16 to 60 to help save lives.
Lastly, the Red Cross officer has also indicated that their blood stocks in the blood bank is extremely low thus making situation more critical.

So please spread this message to your friends and relatives of the said event.
For enquiries and/or make an appointment for the timing on the actual day,
Call : 1234567Email: 1234567@hotmail.com

Kindly provide us with your name, NRIC, contact number, and email/call to register for an appointment.

Thanks and Regards,
Mary Chia Shan Shan
Organising Committee Coordinator,
Blood Donation Drive 2008,
XXX CC


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This is an email sent out to urge donors to come forward to donate their blood.

This email is clear in emphasizing points that are more important in the form of bolding and increasing the fonts of the words. Another good point is that the writer starts and signs off the email in the appropriate way with her designation and where she is from. In addition, the tone of the email sounds generally pleasant.

However, I feel that the email is not very organized as the facts were not properly listed down and there is not much sequence on the email as the writer jumps from the event to some background facts of the need to donate blood and back to the event again. Perhaps the writer should have started off by introducing the event and all the details before talking about some whelming facts of blood donation.

The email is not very concise too as details of the event will not very clearly stated. For example, the time frame of the event should be listed rather than just stating the start of the event. More details of the events such as, how long will donors take to donate his blood and are there any special points that a potential donor needs to take note before donation should also be mentioned in the email.

There are also some expression problems in the email. For example, “My names Mary Chia Shan Shan.” should be expressed as “My name is Mary Chia Shan Shan.”

3 Comments:

At February 16, 2009 at 4:31 AM , Blogger Brad Blackstone said...

Thank you, Zoelyn, for this detailed and critical analysis. You do a very good job of pinpointing both strengths and weaknesses in the mail (though we can't see the bold and font size changes).

I really appreciate your effort!

 
At February 18, 2009 at 6:35 PM , Blogger HT said...

I think Zoelyn meant that the title of the event was in bold, and the event details was in a larger font. I do not see any other portions of the email with different formating either though. It might have been useful to title the facts as "Interesting Facts about Blood Donation" and have this in bold as well. I find this important as this was the only portion in the email that somewhat gave reasons for the recipient to be persuaded to donate blood.

On a similar note, I too agree with Zoelyn that the writer should have rearranged the facts to have a separate portion about the event, leaving the interesting facts as compelling reasons why someone should go for the donation drive.

 
At February 23, 2009 at 10:07 AM , Blogger Zoelyn Teo said...

Hi HT,
Thanks for the clarification on my behalf. :)
I agree to your idea that the fact title can be change to "Interesting Facts about Blood Donation". This title is more catchy and makes the readers curious to read on.
Thank you HT! Your feedback is noted!

 

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