TRANSCRIPT OF THE ABOVE VIDEO: English Writing Lesson: Formal and Informal Email Greetings - How To Correctly Begin An Email

Hi everyone, its Nicole here and I'm answering another one of your questions. This one is actually about email writing, and one of my students wants to know: How can I start that email greeting instead of always saying dear? What else can I say?

That's a really good question. I do have a few alternatives for you, both formal and informal, however Dear is something that we just can't avoid, you know, it is the most common greeting, and expected greeting, when we write an email.

But anyway, as you are aware, when we write, there can be really formal emails to people we don't know, or people that we work with, people that we respect, so we have to show that formality and respect in our greeting, in our writing, as well, but then there's also emails that we write that are really informal, to family and friends, and people we know really well. So, obviously, there, the greeting is a little bit different.

So, first of all, obviously, we've got Dear plus the first name. So, Dear Nicole, Dear John, Dear Jan, whatever, so your first name goes there, whether its formal or informal doesn’t matter, you can still just have Dear plus the first name, or we've got Dear Mr Smith. In that situation, obviously, it's formal, we've just got the Dear plus the title and the surname, the family name, there.

The next, Dear Sir, again only very very formal, we only use this if we know it's a man, but we don't know their name, and we want to show that respect, probably the first time you're writing to them there as well, so formal, and the female equivalent would be Dear Madam, not mam, but madam, the full word, again formal, you know it's a female but you don't know her actual name, her title, so you call her madam. You could have Dear Sir/Madam if you don't know whether it's a man or a woman that you're writing to as well.

Another really formal greeting there would be To whom it may concern, again, that is super formal, again, you're not 100% sure who you're writing to, or what their job title is, so you have to be a little bit more general there, and To whom it may concern simply means this letter is being sent to whoever is the relevant person.

Obviously if you know someone really well, you just say hi, you know, you can just say hi by itself or you could say hi plus their name. So Hi, Nicole or Hello Nicole. Both of those are obviously informal.

You could use the greeting for the time of day. That's a different way. Instead of saying Dear, you could just say Good morning Nicole, or Good afternoon Nicole, both of them could be formal or informal.

And then you could also, instead of having a person's name after the dear, you could have what we call a collective idea, so you could say something like Dear colleagues, so the email is being sent to all of your colleagues or Dear all, the email is being sent to all.

And you know, the easiest one if you're writing to a group is just to write Hi everyone, something like that.

So, there are few alternatives for dear, and for starting those emails with a lovely professional impressive appropriate greeting. I hope that's helped. If you have any questions, or alternatives that I didn't think of, write them down here in the comments section.

Thanks so much. Have a lovely day. Bye.