Email a Potential Reference: Letter Writing and Life Skills

Email a Potential Reference: Letter Writing and Life Skills is a resource to help your students understand how to write a polite email to a potential reference

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We spend so much time in the classroom teaching our students creative writing and essay writing, but when they have careers in the future, what kind of writing will occupy most of their day? Emails of course! In this assignment a specific kind of email that high school students may need to write is high-lighted and explicitly explained.

Grades: This assignment could work well for students in grades 5-12.

How to use:

I would recommend downloading my Email: The Basics Handout and using it to teach your students the key vocabulary components of every email: to, carbon copy, blind carbon copy, subject, salutation, body, signature, attachments, compose, forward, reply, and reply all. Students need to know the function of each of these parts of the email (especially to avoid the dreaded "Reply All" mistake that we have all made once or twice).

Then, you can focus on this specific email example: emailing a potential reference. Talk to your students about how in most of these cases they are requesting a favour and therefore need to be conscientious and polite. Discuss how to choose an appropriate subject line and salutation with this in mind. You may want to write an entire sample email together as a class (perhaps typed on an interactive whiteboard). Finally, students are assigned a specific task to practice this type of email. They could write by hand on the provided sheet or type it up on their computer.

If you like this email assignment, check out my other ones:

Emailing a Job Application

Emailing an Apartment Listing

Emailing a Teacher or Coach

A one-page worksheet with an email template and tips for this specific kind of email.