Business English: Common Writing Mistakes

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When writing letters and emails for work, it’s important to write correctly because mistakes can make your English look unprofessional. In this lesson you’ll learn how to avoid 10 common mistakes in business English writing.

1. “I am writing in respect of our recent purchase”. Instead, you should write “I am writing in reference to…”, “I am writing with regard to..” or “I am writing regarding / concerning our recent purchase”. All of these options are correct, but you can’t use “in respect of”.
2. “We would like to regret the delay”. Regret means you feel bad for doing something wrong, so you need to say “We regret the delay” or “We would like to apologize for the delay”.
3. The word assure is followed by a person, it means to help remove the person’s doubt. The word ensure is followed by a fact. Ensure means to help guarantee the fact so you should write “I assure you that our products are of the highest quality”, “We have a quality control process to ensure that every item is free from defects”. Again assure is followed by a person and ensure is followed by a fact.
4. “Your order will be shipped until Wednesday”. At the latest when talking about events that will be completed before a certain day in the futur,e use by for a single specific event and use until for a continuous event. Shipping the order is a single specific event so we need to use by “Your order will be shipped by Wednesday”. At the latest here’s an example of a continuous action where you need to use until “We will be performing maintenance until the 25th”. The maintenance will be continuous until stopping on the 25th.
5. “I would like to request some informations about your services”. In English, the word information is an uncountable noun, so it is never plural. This means we need to write “I would like to request some information about your services”.
6. “We except all major credit cards”. The word accept spelled with an A means to receive willingly and the word except spelled with an E means to exclude. When speaking, these words are pronounced the same except when writing. We need to make sure to use the correct one. The correct sentence is “We accept all major credit cards”. Here’s an example of except used correctly “We offer free shipping to every US state except Alaska and Hawaii. This means Alaska and Hawaii are not included in the free shipping offer.
7. “We appreciate your cooperate“. After articles (a, an, the) and possessives (my, your, his, her, our, and their) always use a noun not a verb. Cooperate is a verb so the correct sentence is “We appreciate your cooperation“. Cooperation is the noun form of cooperate.
8. “I want you to send me the files right now”. In professional communications it’s important to be polite especially when making a request, giving an order or expressing criticism. A better way to write this sentence is “Could you please send me the files as soon as possible?” The expression could you and including the word please make the sentence sound more polite.
9. “the conference begins on friday, july 8th it will be held in los angeles california”. Not using correct capitalization and punctuation makes a very bad impression. In professional communications in English, we capitalize the first word of each sentence (proper names, names of cities, states, countries and languages, names of days, of the week and months and the word I. So the correct way to write the sentence is like this “The conference begins on Friday, July 8th. It will be held in Los Angeles California”. We capitalize the first word of each new sentence; the day of the week Friday, the month July and the city and state Los Angeles, California.
10. “I look forward to hear from you”. After the expression look forward to always use a noun or the” ing” form of the verb. So the correct sentence is “I look forward to hearing from you”. Here are two more examples. You can write “I look forward to visiting your company” or “I look forward to the visit“. In the first case we use the verb in the “ing” form visiting and in the second case we use the noun the visit.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Source: Espresso English Channel on Youtube