Email is where grammar mistakes do the most damage, because they don’t vanish the way a slip in conversation does. Your message sits in someone’s inbox, gets read twice, and often gets forwarded to people you’ve never met. A wobble in a spoken sentence is gone in a second; the same wobble in writing stays on the record. The good news is that the mistakes people make in English emails are remarkably predictable — the same dozen turn up again and again — so once you know them, you can catch them before you press send.
The opening lines trip people up first
The first sentence of an email is where nerves show, and three errors dominate. The first is the infinitive of purpose: “I am writing for ask about the invoice” should be “I am writing to ask.” You write to do something, never for do something. The second is a fixed phrase almost everyone bends slightly out of shape: “I hope this email finds you good” needs the adverb — “finds you well.” The third is a tense problem. “I have sent the report yesterday” mixes the present perfect with a finished time. If you name when it happened — yesterday, last week, on Monday — use the past simple: “I sent the report yesterday.”
The small words that quietly give you away
Articles and prepositions are tiny, and they carry more weight in email than almost anywhere else. “Please find attached document” needs an article: “Please find the document attached.” Prepositions cause the next slip — “I’ll call you on next week” should just be “next week,” with no preposition before next, last or this. And “Waiting your reply” is missing a word: you wait for something, so it’s “waiting for your reply.” While we’re here, quietly retire “please find attached herewith” and “please revert back” — revert already means “reply,” so back is doing nothing. “I’ll get back to you” is warmer and correct.
Uncountable nouns and confusable words
Some English nouns never take an “s,” and email is exactly where the stray plural sneaks in. There is no such word as informations, feedbacks or advices — they stay singular: “thank you for the information,” “any feedback is welcome.” Two more catch people every day. “Sorry for the inconvenient” swaps an adjective for a noun; you want “sorry for the inconvenience.” And the sign-off itself is often wrong: it’s “Best regards,” plural, not “Best regard” — small, but it’s the last thing your reader sees.
Being polite without breaking the grammar
Politeness is where careful writers overcorrect. After a modal verb like could, would or can, you don’t need to: “Could you please to send it” should be “Could you please send it.” The same goes for “Kindly to confirm” — drop the to, and to most British readers a plain “please confirm” sounds more natural than “kindly” anyway. Last one: “Please confirm me the date” needs a rebuild, because you confirm something, not someone — “please confirm the date” or “please confirm the date to me.” These are the exact patterns we drill in our Workplace English course, using your own real emails, so the corrections start happening automatically instead of an hour after you’ve hit send.
A thirty-second check before you send
You don’t need to memorise grammar rules to write clean emails — you need one habit. Read the message aloud before you send it; your ear catches a missing “for” or a stray “s” that your eye slides straight past. Check the opening line and the sign-off with extra care, because those are the two sentences every reader actually notices. And learn your own three repeat offenders — almost everyone loops the same few mistakes, and fixing those three cleans up most of what you write.
Clear email English isn’t about sounding formal or clever; it’s about making sure a busy reader takes you seriously and does what you asked. If you’d like to stop second-guessing every message — working through your own emails with a native teacher until the right version comes out first — that’s exactly what we do at Kensington English. A few focused lessons is usually all it takes.
