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Application Writing

How might you use word-choice to elevate your professionalism?

Alignment: this helps make any document look “clean.” Breaks in alignment tend to signal breaks in information.
Spacing: Don’t crowd your text. Include spacing between clear sections of different information.
Organization of ideas: what information should come first? What information should be prioritized?
Appropriate language use: The use of language in this email is clearly problematic. How might you use word-choice to elevate your professionalism?
Specificity of details: make sure to include things like what class you are in and what assignment you are referencing. Too often, students will email me to ask about an assignment. Some semesters, I have over 80 students. I may not know who you are or what you are referencing. It is better to assume that this is probably the case for all of your professors and your future supervisors until you have established a relationship.
Tone: what is tone? Tone is related to language use and organization of your text. It is a more abstract, but important component of writing. You can read a document, email, or text, and get a sense of whether a person is angry, disrespectful, professional, empathetic, deliberate, worried, to name a few tones. When students use “Hey,” to address a new supervisor or a professor, the reader may think that this writer may be disrespectful or unprofessional, even if this is not the intended tone.

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