English · Email Writing
Email to Your Friend About Your Visit to a Place of Interest
A model email describing a visit, with the header and a full message body.
Write it in time order and in the past tense: where you went and when, what you saw, and the one thing you will remember. Keep the subject line specific to the place rather than writing "My visit", and close with an invitation for your friend to go too, which gives the email a natural ending.
The question: Write an email to your friend about your visit to a place of historical interest.
The format
Fix the place and the time in the first two sentences
A visit email is a narrative, and narratives need a when and a where before anything else. Say where you went and when you got back, then move straight into what you saw.
- Name a real place you know something about.
- Give the date or the day of return.
- 🚨 Keep the description in the past tense.
Choose the detail a photograph misses
Anyone can look up what a monument looks like. What earns the content mark is the thing that does not photograph — the quiet, the light, how few people were there, what the guide said.
- One sentence of hard fact, attributed to a guide or a sign.
- One sentence of something only a visitor would know.
- ⚠️ One line of history is enough; more turns it into an encyclopaedia entry.
Invite them, with a practical note
Close by suggesting your friend goes, and add when — early, or in the winter. A practical note turns a polite ending into a real invitation.
Model answer
Model answer (about 140 words)
Subject: My visit to the Sixty Dome Mosque
Dear Tanzim,
I got back from Bagerhat on Sunday and I have been meaning to tell you about it since, because you were the one who said I should go.
The Sixty Dome Mosque is far stranger than the photographs suggest. It is low and very wide, built of thin brick, and inside there are sixty pillars holding up seventy-seven domes, so wherever you stand the roof looks different. Our guide said it was built in the fifteenth century by Khan Jahan Ali and that the bricks were made on the spot. What stayed with me was the quiet — it was a weekday morning and for ten minutes there was nobody else inside. Go in the winter if you can, and go early. When are you free? We could plan it together.
Yours ever,
Ruhul
What earns and loses marks
- Choose one detail that photographs do not capture — the quiet, the smell, the light. That is what makes a description sound like a visit rather than a guidebook entry.
- Write about 120 to 150 words in the body. An email answer of 250 words has usually become a letter with a subject line on top.
- 🚨 Do not add your postal address anywhere. That is the single clearest sign that a letter answer has been reused for an email question.
- Keep the subject line and the first sentence consistent — if the subject says one thing and the message opens on another, the answer looks assembled rather than written.
- Sign with your name only; no designation, no address, no phone number in an informal email.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. A real place you know something about gives you accurate details to use — a date, a builder, a material — and accuracy is easier than invention. Places like the Sixty Dome Mosque, Paharpur, Sonargaon, the Sundarbans and Cox’s Bazar all work well.
The past, throughout the description. The opening line and the closing invitation are naturally in the present or the future — “I got back on Sunday”, “we could plan it together” — but every sentence describing the visit belongs in the past.
One sentence. A visit email is about what you saw and felt, not about the monument’s chronology, and a paragraph of dates turns it into an encyclopaedia entry. Attribute the fact to a guide or a sign, as the model does, and move on.
Keep going
Model answers, formats and grammar rules for every SSC and HSC writing question.