# How to Make a Formal Email, Step by Step Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-make-a-formal-email/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-make-a-formal-email.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer How to make a formal email in seven steps: the subject line, greeting, the ask, body, sign-off, and the final check that catches a wrong tone. ## Key facts - Title: How to Make a Formal Email, Step by Step - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Professional Behaviors, Building Confidence - Primary keyword: how to make a formal email - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-make-a-formal-email/ ## What this page covers - How to make a formal email in seven steps: the subject line, greeting, the ask, body, sign-off, and the final check that catches a wrong tone. - Practical guidance for how to make a formal email - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Most people looking up how to make a formal email already have one sitting in a draft window. The words are mostly there. What is missing is any way to check that the whole thing reads the way it should to a professor, a recruiter, or a manager you have not met. A formal email has six parts in a fixed order: a specific subject line, a greeting matched to the recipient, an opening sentence that states your purpose, a short body carrying one main point, a closing courtesy line with a formal sign-off, and a signature with your name and role. Two things sit outside that frame — deciding who receives it, and one last check before you send. The frame is short and it does not change. What varies is the judgment inside it, and that is the part the templates leave out. ## How to make a formal email in seven steps Laid out as a process rather than a diagram, the six parts become seven steps. Three of them involve no writing at all: two decisions made before you draft, and one check made after. Those three are where the errors that actually cost you something tend to sit. ### 1. Decide that email is the right medium, and settle who receives it Writing suits three jobs well: passing on information one way, creating a record, and making a clear request. Anything sensitive, complicated, or genuinely open to negotiation goes worse in text than in a conversation, and choosing email for those is a mistake no amount of careful wording repairs. Then fix the [recipient list](/knowledge/communication/examples-of-email-etiquette/), and check the spelling of the name. The writing centers at Boise State and Boston University's School of Public Health both put this near the top of their guidance, and for a plain reason: a misspelled name undermines an otherwise polished message, and it is the one error the reader is guaranteed to notice. The same guides raise the address you are sending from — a professional account in the [firstname.lastname form](/knowledge/communication/formal-email-address/) rather than a handle you made as a teenager. Neither of these can be corrected after you press send. ### 2. Write the subject line first Sources disagree on length, which is itself the useful finding. Grammarly's formal email guide puts it at roughly 30 to 50 characters, or four to seven words. SmartReach's format guide says around 40 characters, or six to nine. Others simply say under ten words. No one owns the number, so the real rule is not length but specificity. The contrast that recurs across the guides is between a line like "The internship report you asked for" and one like "Internship Report, Week 12." The second names the thing and its identifier, so the reader can file it, find it later, and decide whether it needs them today. Write it before the body, not after. If you cannot name the email in six words, you do not yet know what it is for, and the draft underneath will show it. ### 3. Choose the greeting Use "Dear" plus title and last name for [someone senior](/knowledge/working-with-your-manager/how-to-write-email-to-boss/), external, or unknown to you. "Hello" plus their name is the safe middle register for a colleague you have some contact with. Where you do not know how to address someone, their full name is safer than a guessed title. What every source agrees on is the floor: no "Hey," no "What's up," no emoji, no slang. Overloop, Atomicmail, and Indeed all name these explicitly. This step also locks something in. The register you choose here has to match the sign-off in step six, which is the single most common reason an early-career email reads as unsure of itself. ### 4. State your purpose in the opening line Say who you are if the reader needs to know, and what you want. The standard across the guides, from Indeed to SmartReach, is that the reader should know your ask by the end of the first paragraph. This is the instruction most first drafts get backwards. The instinct, especially when writing to someone with authority, is to lay out the background first and arrive at the request in the last line — it feels more polite. It reads as evasion, and it makes the reader work to find out what is being asked of them. Burying the ask is listed alongside typos and walls of text as a top-tier mistake for a reason. ### 5. Build the body around one main point Give the reader only the context they need in order to act, and nothing else. The convention across sources is short paragraphs of no more than four or five sentences, in [plain wording](/knowledge/communication/business-writing-skills/) rather than elaborate phrasing. One email, one main point. If a second ask has crept in while you were drafting, it belongs in a second email — a message carrying two requests usually gets an answer to one of them. ### 6. Close with a courtesy line, a sign-off, and a full signature Three things, in order. A forward-looking line, along the lines of thanking the reader for their time or saying you look forward to their reply. Then the sign-off, drawn from a set small enough to memorize: Sincerely, Best regards, Kind regards, Yours faithfully. Then your signature — full name, role, organization, and one way to reach you. Consistency of register matters more here than the choice between one sign-off and another. A message that opens with "Dear Dr. Okonkwo" and ends with "Thanks!" does not read as friendly; it reads as someone who was not sure which register they were in, which is the impression you were trying to avoid. ### 7. Read it aloud, check the attachment, then send Read the whole message out loud. Both Mailchimp's proofreading guidance and Business Management Daily's seven-step proofread name this as the tone check, and it works because formality errors are audible rather than visible. A sentence can be perfectly correct and still land as curt or as grovelling; silent reading skips the register entirely, and a grammar tool never sees it at all. Then check the attachment. Missing attachments come up repeatedly as their own failure mode, with a stated cost: the reply is delayed, and you have to send a second email to fix the first, which spends your credibility twice for one mistake. Then send it, rather than redraft it. Templates are abundant on this topic — SmartReach publishes 34 of them, Saleshandy more than 17, status.net nine — and they run out for the same reason every time: the situation you are actually in is rarely the one somebody wrote a sample for. What carries across situations is the calibration, and calibration is the one thing nobody gives you feedback on. When a message lands slightly wrong, no one writes back to tell you so. If you have never had that checked against anything, it is worth finding out [how your written tone reads](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before the stakes on a message get higher. ## What makes the next one easier to write Read the seven steps back and notice how little of the difficulty was in the wording. Choosing the medium, holding the same register from the greeting to the sign-off, resisting the urge to explain yourself before you ask — none of that is writing. It is a set of habits, and habits are learned rather than inherited. **Communication** does most of the visible work here. Its email principles are the ones the steps keep circling: lead with the main message, keep the subject line short and specific, copy only the people who need it, proofread, reply in reasonable time. Sitting above all of them is a decision the compose window never prompts you to make — whether this should be an email at all, or a conversation you are avoiding because writing feels safer. **Professional Behaviors** covers the layer that formality is really made of. Being polite, dressing for your role in the written sense of a real signature and a correct name, speaking about absent colleagues as though they might read it, and keeping confidential material out of a channel that forwards itself without asking. It also names what to steer clear of: the passive message that never quite states its point, and the sharp one written while annoyed. None of this asks you to defer to whoever outranks you — it is respect applied evenly, and it is learnable in an afternoon. **Building Confidence** is what gets a finished email sent. If a draft has been open for two days, the useful move is the one this skill describes for procrastination: decide in advance when you will write it and when it goes, then clear only the first step, which here is the subject line. The rest follows from that. And the second formal email is easier than the first because you sent the first one — not because you found a better template. The Job Skills Test is a short self-assessment of how you actually work, and it does not stop at writing. It scores you across all **twelve work skills** the framework treats as buildable, which is how you find out whether email is genuinely your weak point or simply the place you happened to notice one. Worth seeing [where your strengths already sit](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) before you decide what to practice. ## The emails you have not had to write yet Some of the seven steps probably match what you already do without thinking about it, and one or two almost certainly do not. Which ones fall on which side tells you more about your starting point than any template can. Nothing here asks you to write in a voice that is not yours; it asks that a few calls you currently make on instinct start getting made deliberately, which is a change in habit rather than in character. The stakes do climb. Asking a colleague to extend a deadline is a different weight from asking a director to fund something, and both arrive earlier than most people expect — built from the same six parts, learned the same way. Checking the format before sending is a small thing, and most people skip it entirely. ## Where your work skills actually stand The only thing left is to find out where you are starting from. The Job Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the skills you use at work: you answer questions about how you genuinely operate rather than how you would like to, and it scores you across all twelve — written communication, professional conduct, and confidence among them. What comes back is ranked, so you can see which one or two are worth deliberate attention over the next few months instead of guessing. Seven minutes, on your own, and the next time a formal email sits unsent you will know which part of it deserves the thought. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, takes seven minutes, and your results appear right away.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? How to make a formal email in seven steps: the subject line, greeting, the ask, body, sign-off, and the final check that catches a wrong tone. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Professional Behaviors, Building Confidence. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/professional-behaviors.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/confidence.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/how-to-make-a-formal-email/ Preferred summary: "How to make a formal email in seven steps: the subject line, greeting, the ask, body, sign-off, and the final check that catches a wrong tone." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.