English Training Course - Writing an internal bad news email

Now you will a short email from Jenny, who is responsible for her company’s IT services. She is writing this email to give her colleagues some bad news.
Subject: Server Restart Inform
We will restart our mail server from 17:15PM to 18:00PM today because of the backup tape equipment has some problems, I’m afraid that we will restart the server many times, sorry for the inconvenience to you, any questions please call 588.

Best regards,

Jenny

Let’s talk about the best way to deliver a bad news. When you write to someone outside your company, it is a good idea to use an indirect style. Although you should also make sure your readers understand and accept the bad news. But in this case, Jenny is writing to her own colleagues, in this internal bad news, it is best to use more direct style, since the company wants to deliver you the bad news efficiently. At the same time, she needs to be polite and to show understanding for her colleagues receiving the bad news.

All right, let’s start with the mechanics of this email.
As you can see, we have a subject line. We can not use inform as a noun in this way, so we’d better change this to something like notice.

When we looked into the body of this email, the first thing we noticed is the entire message is just one sentence.

Subject: Server Restart Notice
We will restart our mail server from 17:15PM to 18:00PM today because of the backup tape equipment has some problems. I’m afraid that we will restart the server many times. Sorry for the inconvenience to you. Any questions please call 588.

Best regards,

Jenny

In the first paragraph, Jenny wrote the company will restart the server. Since Jenny is using 24-hour time here, she doesn’t need PM after 17:15 or 18:00. Also we need to change because of to because. Remember that because of always follows by a noun or noun phrase.
We can not also say ‘Any questions please call 588’, it is actually a sentence fragment. We’d better change this to a complete sentence by making the first part into a clause – ‘If you have any questions, please call 588’.

And finally, we should think about constructing email into a separate paragraph.


Subject: Server Restart Notice
We will restart our mail server from 17:15 to 18:00 today because the backup tape equipment has some problems. I’m afraid that we will restart the server many times.

Sorry for the inconvenience to you. If you have any questions, please call 588.

Best regards,

Jenny

Now let’s move to the style of this email, when you writing an email to deliver a bad news, one good strategy is to buffer the news, that is, to put some neutral material at the beginning and the end of the email, and also at the beginning and the end of the paragraph containing bad news. This makes the delivery less (a bright), and helps avoid giving a negative impression to the reader.
As you can see, Jenny has not followed the rule. She goes straight to the bad news.
Let’s rewrite this paragraph to put the explanation first:

We have discussed that the backup tape equipment for our mail server has some problems. For this reason, we will restart the server from 17:15 to 18:00 today. I’m afraid that we will restart the server many times.

The last sentence of the paragraph gives the readers some additional bad news’, we can rephrase this words in a positive way.

We have discussed that the backup tape equipment for our mail server has some problems. For this reason, we will restart the server beginning at 17:15 today. We expected the server to be available again after 18:00.

When an email has to deliver a bad news, it is also helpful to emphasize what the readers would benefit by cooperating. So let’s help Jenny add a new sentence in the second paragraph.

We have discussed that the backup tape equipment for our mail server has some problems. For this reason, we will restart the server beginning at 17:15 today. We expected the server to be available again after 18:00.

These repairs to the server will make your Internet and email connections more reliable in the future.

In the last paragraph, ‘Sorry’ sounds very informal, let’s change to ‘We apologize for’.

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call me on the extension 588.

Finally, we should add a closing sentence to show the appreciation.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.



Let’s look at the update email:

Subject: Server Restart Notice

We have discussed that the backup tape equipment for our mail server has some problems. For this reason, we will restart the server beginning at 17:15 today. We expected the server to be available again after 18:00.

These repairs to the server will make your Internet and email connections more reliable in the future.

We apologize for the inconvenience. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to call me on the extension 588.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Regards,

Jenny