English · Email Writing
Email to Your Friend About Your Aim in Life
A complete model email about your aim in life, with the header fields filled in.
Give the email a subject that names the topic — "My aim in life" — then state the aim in the opening line, explain in one paragraph why you chose it and what you are doing to reach it, and close by asking about your friend's plans. An email is shorter than the equivalent letter, so two body paragraphs are enough.
The question: Write an email to your friend telling him about your aim in life.
The format
Name the aim in the subject line and the first sentence
An email is read in a list before it is opened, so the subject must carry the topic. Then say the aim outright in the opening line — there is no room in 140 words to approach it gradually.
- Subject: My aim in life is exactly right here.
- State the aim as a fact, not as a hope.
- 🚨 One aim only.
Compress the reason into three sentences
A letter can spend a paragraph on where the aim came from; an email cannot. Choose the single event that produced it, name it, and say what you are doing about it now.
- One event, two sentences.
- One sentence on what you are studying because of it.
- Naming an institution or a field makes the plan concrete.
Close by asking about theirs
Finish with a direct question about your friend's plans. It costs one line and turns the email into half a conversation.
Model answer
Model answer (about 140 words)
Subject: My aim in life
Dear Rafi,
Thanks for your message last week. You asked what I plan to do after the HSC, and rather than give you the vague answer I gave on the phone, I thought I would write it down properly.
I want to be an agricultural scientist. It came from the summer I spent at my grandfather's in Dinajpur, watching him lose a third of his potato crop to a blight nobody in the village could name. I have been reading about plant pathology since, and the university at Mymensingh is where I would like to go. It is a narrower plan than most of our friends have, which is exactly why I like it. What have you decided? Write back.
Yours ever,
Sabbir
What earns and loses marks
- Give the aim a source. A specific summer and a named crop disease make the answer memorable; “I want to serve my country” appears in most scripts.
- 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
It is shorter and it opens differently. The email has a header instead of an address block and two body paragraphs instead of three, so the reasoning has to be compressed into a few sentences. The content is the same; the discipline of the form is what is being tested.
Name the topic directly: “My aim in life”. It is one of the few subject lines that can be almost identical to the question, because the question itself names the topic precisely. Avoid “Hello” or “About my future”, which tell the reader nothing.
Yes, if you can. A named institution or a named field makes the plan concrete and gives the paragraph a second sentence of content. Vague ambition — “I want to be successful” — leaves the paragraph with nothing to develop.
Keep going
Model answers, formats and grammar rules for every SSC and HSC writing question.