You can hold a technical conversation, defend your work in a meeting, and handle the hard parts of your job in a second language. And then a blank email opens, the cursor blinks, and a two-minute task turns into twenty.
If that's the thing that quietly eats your day, you're not bad at English. You're just missing a system.
In this short solo episode, Olivia digs into why writing work emails in English feels so much harder than speaking — and shares eight practical fixes you can use on your very next email.
What You'll Learn in This Episode
Because writing takes away everything that makes conversation easy. There's no nod, no "sorry, what?", no chance to read a face and adjust. Just words on a screen that someone will read without you there to explain them. That's why even confident speakers freeze at a blank page — and why the fix isn't "get better at English" but having a structure you don't have to think about.
Because politeness doesn't survive the trip. What reads as perfectly normal and polite in German or Dutch can land as blunt or even rude in English. Email carries its own etiquette, separate from how you speak and separate from your native language — so a word-for-word translation quietly works against you, especially if your language is more direct than English.
Read the good emails you already receive. You're getting English emails from colleagues and clients every week — start noticing their structure, tone, and punctuation, and keep a running list of the phrases that work. When you're stuck, you pull from your own collection instead of a blank page.
Default to too nice. Without tone of voice, emails read colder than you mean them to, so warm it up on purpose — conditional forms ("Could you possibly…"), plenty of pleases and thank-yous, and clear, friendly phrasing. People remember how you made them feel long after they've forgotten a small grammar slip.
Yes — critically. These tools catch errors you'd miss and can suggest cleaner phrasing, but they're a second pair of eyes, not the final word. If a suggestion doesn't sound like you, ignore it. The judgement stays yours.
Building a system. Most work emails repeat the same handful of situations — confirming a meeting, chasing a contractor, flagging a delay. Once you see the pattern, you build a template and stop starting from scratch every time.
The English for Engineers podcast is here to help engineers and technicians from all backgrounds improve their communication skills and provide them with interesting facts so that Technical and Business English becomes their new superpower.
Resources and Links
- Grab the free guide: Unstuck Your English
- Look into the Technical English Group Course for ambitious engineers: this episode is basically the theory behind why the course is built the way it is.
- Simplify your project communication with the Emails for Engineers template package
- Read the full written breakdown: The Fast System for Writing Professional Emails (As an Engineer)
Connect with Olivia Augustin
Olivia Augustin is a civil engineer and certified English as a second language teacher. With her one-on-one lessons and group courses, she teaches non-native English-speaking engineers the kind of English that gets the job done.
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