Lazy Letter Writers

Writing a letter in English is a challenging task for most non-native speakers. There are many factors to consider like the appropriate use of vocabulary and getting the degree of formality right.

In today's activity we'll look at some different letters from the LetterWhiz site and see how you can adapt them for your own purpose.
LetterWhiz has a wide variety of ready written letter templates that you can use and adapt when you want to write to someone. These include:

• Business (employee relations, announcements)
• Career (cover letters, job promotions, resignations)
• Love / special occasions (weddings, birthdays, anniversaries)
• Personal (apologies, family invitations, (for sale/to buy) letters)
• Educational (applications, scholarships, presentations)

Task:

You are going to look at three different letters from people who are introducing themselves. They are:

1. Teacher's introduction to his / her students
2. Person introducing themselves to someone on an online dating site
3. New employee introduction to other staff

Before you look at the letters, think about:

• Which will be longest / shortest?
• Which will be most formal / informal?
• What information do you think each will include?

Try to draft each of the letters yourself as you would write them.
Now look at the letters and compare them to see how close your guesses were.

• Letter 1
• Letter 2
• Letter 3

Did any of the letters surprise you?

• Now edit the letters so that they are from you. It's important if you do use any of these letters from the site, that you make sure you change them so that the information in them is about you and it is true. There are some things more important than writing grammatically correct letters. - the truth and sincerity of the content is also very important.

I hope you've enjoyed this activity and that you search through the other letter templates and find useful ones to help with your writing.

Come back tomorrow for more EFL ESL activities.

Related links:

• Make you own animated movies
• Using wikis with EFL students
• Creating a Wiki
• Animated EFL ESL Writing Prompts
• Adventure Narratives for EFL ESL Students
• See 20 more writing activities

Best

Nik Peachey