We recently wrote a post on ways to sound more confident at work. We thought we’d expand more upon that and focus specifically on emailing and simple phrases you can replace to sound more confident, to the point, and allow less room for misinterpretation (which is a common complaint about some email messages). Here are our suggestions for ways to reframe common email phrases.

In addition to the suggestions above, some other ways to improve your communication via email are to remove hedge words. Hedge words are what we add to our sentences to soften our words and can make us sound less confident and sure of ourselves. Some examples of hedge words include: may, possibly, nearly, might, perhaps, etc. While there is a time and a place to be tentative with your words, usually you’ll want to nix such words to come across sure of yourself and what you are presenting. When it comes to email, it’s best to remove the fluff and get straight to the point.