Email to a Colleague about Improving a Future Survey
Situations for Sending an Email to Colleague
In TOEFL Writing Part 2, you are tasked to compose an email based on a given situation. One common scenario is writing an email to a colleague about an event that has already taken place. In this case, the email typically focuses on providing feedback or suggesting ways to improve future events.
Because this type of email serves a professional purpose, it is important to maintain an appropriate level of formality throughout the message.
Maintain Formality
The level of formality in an email depends on the context and the relationship between the sender and the recipient. In TOEFL Writing Part 2, emails addressed to colleagues are generally written for professional purposes. Although colleagues are not strangers, the relationship is typically work-related rather than personal.
For this reason, casual or informal language is usually inappropriate unless the prompt explicitly allows it. Maintaining a clear and professional tone is essential in this task.
Now, let’s try writing an email based on a similar scenario.
Practice Question
Email Prompt
You will read some information and use the information to write an email. You will have 7 minutes to write the email.
Your colleague, Daniel, organized a small internal survey last month to collect opinions about remote work policies in your department. The goal was to understand employees’ preferences and concerns. However, some colleagues felt that the survey questions were unclear, and the results did not fully reflect their views.
You would like to give Daniel feedback on the survey.
Write an email to Daniel. In your email, do the following:
- Explain the issues that some colleagues had with the survey.
- Describe how people in the department reacted to the results.
- Suggest how future surveys could be improved.
Write as much as you can and in complete sentences.
Your Response:
To: Daniel
Subject: Feedback on the Remote Work Survey
Remember that you only have 7 minutes to complete the task. This means you are not expected to provide an in-depth analysis of the problem or detailed suggestions. Keep your ideas simple and focus on clarity.
Also, since you are writing an email to a colleague, the tone does not need to be overly formal. As long as you avoid highly colloquial expressions, a polite and natural style is enough.
Model Answer
To: Daniel
Subject: Feedback on the Remote Work Survey
Hi Daniel,
Thank you for putting together the remote work survey last month. I appreciate the effort you made to collect opinions from the team. I did want to share some feedback about the survey. Some colleagues mentioned that the questions were ambiguous, which made it difficult to choose answers that fully reflected their views. Because of this, the results were met with mixed reactions among colleagues, and some felt their concerns were not accurately represented.
For future surveys, it might help to clarify the wording of the questions and include space for open-ended comments. This could lead to more accurate and useful results.
Best regards,
Joe
Opening Greeting
This email is addressed to a colleague, so the opening can be as simple as “Hi [Name],” if you know the recipient and the required level of formality is not high.
Explaining the Issue
After the greeting, the email begins by explaining the issue with the survey. This part mainly involves rephrasing the problem stated in the prompt. In this case, the instruction indicates that the survey questions were unclear.
We can expand this idea in the email as follows:
Some colleagues mentioned that the questions were ambiguous, which made it difficult to choose answers that fully reflected their views.
The highlighted portion adds detail based on the original prompt. This type of elaboration is effective as long as it can be logically inferred from the information provided.
Explaining Reactions
We are also required to describe how colleagues reacted to the survey. This part again involves summarizing and slightly expanding on the information provided in the prompt.
Prompt: However, some colleagues felt that the survey questions were unclear, and the results did not fully reflect their views.
This idea can be expressed as follows:
Because of this, the results were met with mixed reactions among colleagues, and some felt their concerns were not accurately represented.
This sentence stays faithful to the prompt while clearly describing how the unclear questions affected colleagues’ perceptions of the survey results.
Making Suggestions
Finally, the instruction requires you to suggest how the survey could be improved in the future. In many cases, a clear and effective approach is to propose the opposite of the issue raised in the prompt.
In this survey, colleagues felt that some of the questions were unclear. Based on this feedback, a reasonable suggestion is to make future survey questions clearer and more specific.
In addition, you may propose a solution that is not explicitly stated in the prompt but can be logically inferred from it. For example, allowing space for open-ended responses would give respondents a way to express views that fixed-choice questions may miss.
This idea can be expressed at the end of the email as follows:
For future surveys, it might help to clarify the wording of the questions and include space for open-ended comments. This could lead to more accurate and useful results.
