Understanding & Writing Business Correspondence

Workplace Communication

Memos, e-mails, and letters are among the most common types of communication channels in the workplace. To select the correct means of communication, you’ll need to consider the following factors:

• your audience,
• the complexity/size of your topic,
• the urgency of your message,
• how the message is supposed to be archived,
• and possibly even security concerns.

We’ll begin our discussion of these different forms of communication by describing what memos look like, and will then compare them to other forms of communication, identifying similarities and differences. What’s important to understand about each of them, though, is that they only represent particular forms or formats, i.e. containers, for transmission, and that their content may vary according to the needs/purposes of the sender. The exact content & structure of the body will then depend on the conventions for the individual communication types, e.g. brief notes vs. incident/progress reports, etc.

Throughout this page, you’ll see a number of examples of different containers. To help you explore the similarities and differences in the structure & related content, the examples have been annotated with tooltips, so that when you hover the mouse cursor over the different parts of the example, you can see their respective section labels.

Memos

Memos (short for memoranda; sing. memorandum) are short (single or double page) hard copy pieces of correspondence, generally circulated among colleagues, and sometimes also posted on notice boards for everyone’s reference and attention. Sometimes, though, they may also be used for brief reports for outside institutions.

Memos are important for several reasons. First, they are used among and between multiple levels within a company, or collaborating institutions. This includes commissioning bodies, supervisors, colleagues, as well as your subordinates. Memos are frequently also copied to ‘secondary’ readers, so that a group of people can share the same piece of information.

Because of their efficiency and convenience, memos may represent a major component of your workplace communication. Some of the purposes for memos include:

• Human Resources Arrangements – hirings, firings, reallocation of resources, etc.
• Notifications and updates – decisions made, meeting agendas, etc.
• Instructions – new procedures, rules, tasks, etc.
• Short reports – incident or progress reports

Formatting and Organisation

A memo has three main parts:

1. the header
2. the body
3. supplementary information/materials

The headers in memos tend to consist of the following information:

• information about the organisation
• the type of document being written
• who wrote it, and their position in the organisation
• the intended audience, and their position in the organisation
• when it was written
• the subject of the document

Different organisations may have different format/template to follow for including the above information. Always follow your organisation’s guidelines if they’re available. If no guidelines are available, the following table provides an illustration of what you should be including in different parts of the memo.

Elements in a memo	Formats/Contents
Name of the organisation	The name of the organisation you represent should appear at the top of the document, and be centred.
Document category	The document category alerts the readers to the intention of the document, and roughly which format to expect. In this case, the word Memorandum, or its abbreviated form Memo, should indicate this format.
Date: To: From: Subject:	Following the title, important meta information should be included. When providing the date, it’s advisable to abreviate the name of the month to avoid confusion due to different date representation conventions that may either list the month or day first. Include both the first and last names and titles to identify the author and the recipients of the memo. The subject line should be short, concise, and maximally informative, similar to a heading in a document or bullet point in a presentation.
The body	The body content depends on the exact nature of the document, but will usually include at least a brief statement of purpose or summary, some form of slightly more detailed discussion, as well as a conclusion in the form of some type of outlook, often related to particular actions to be taken in the future. If appropriate for your particular type of document, you can also use headings to show (sub-)divisions.
Supplementary Information	If copies are to go to people other than those stated in the ‘To’ line, they should be listed at the end of the memo under the ‘Copies to’ (Cc) line, again with titles, if applicable. Additional/supporting materials, such as charts, graphs, and tables, should be attached after the memo as appendices, and prefaced by the label ‘Attachments’.

The example below illustrates what an incident report could look like, if formatted as a memo.

Memos are essentially designed to be archived in printed format or displayed on bulletin boards, and will therefore always take up some physical space in a filing system.

Emails

Over the years, email has become the predominant means of routine workplace communication. Many companies encourage an ‘e-mail culture’ because it is fast, convenient, and cost efficient. E-mails allow colleagues to communicate internally amongst themselves, and externally with clients and suppliers. An email also provides an ‘electronic record’ of communications that are automatically archived without taking up any physical space, although some people may still print and store them as hard copies.

Below is a sample email illustrating the format.

From:
To:
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject:

Dear Steven, As a follow-up to our meeting last week, we decided that the proposed interactive website should contain the following sections: - General Section - Presentations - Group Discussions - Reports & Business Communication Let’s meet again next Friday (February 15th) at 5 p.m. to assign job responsibilities for researching and designing the site. The venue will be the Departmental Meeting Room. To prepare for the meeting, please bring along any existing materials and develop ideas about how they could best be integrated into the new website. Please inform me asap if you cannot attend this meeting. Best,    Sam ======================== Sam Chau Assistant Professor Department of English Special University of Hong Kong University Road, Kowloon Tel.: +852-12345678

Analysing an email. Read the above email and answer the following questions:

Analysing and rewriting an email. Read the following email text and answer the questions that follow:

From:
To:
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject:

Barbara, We had no idea last month when we implemented new hiring procedures that major problems would result. Due to the fact that every department is now placing newspaper advertisements for new-hires individually, the problems occurred. This cannot continue. Perhaps we did not make it clear at that time, but all newly hired employees who are hired for a position should be requested through this office. Do not submit your advertisements for new employees directly to an Internet job bank or newspaper. After writing them, they should be brought to Human Resources, where they will be centralised. You should discuss each ad with one of our members of staff. Then we will place the ad in an appropriate newspaper or other publication. If you do not follow these guidelines, chaos will result. You may pick up all applicant folders from us the day after the closing date in an ad. Troy

Rewrite the email in task 3, re-organising it and making it more (reader-)friendly. You can edit directly inside the text above.

Adressing Recipients & Signing Off

When going through and working with the email samples above, you’ll hopefully have noticed a number of things. For instance, you might have seen that the signatures and complimentary closes, if present, may exhibit different levels of formality, and that this will also influence the overall tone of the message. This is because they reflect the (assumed) degree of familiarity between of the sender and the recipient. It’s thus very important to ‘strike the right note’ in the very opening of your mail, so as not to inadvertently offend the recipient. If you're very familiar with a person, you can simply use their first name (as in the example above), although this may sound a little abrupt, or write Hi + first name. In most cases, if you're at least a little familiar/close with the recipient, you can use Dear + first name, but if you're unfamiliar with someone or have to be more polite, then more formal types of address are required, usually involving a combination of Dear + title (Mr., Mrs., Ms., Dr., Prof., etc.) + surname. In some cases, especially when you’re not sure what the first and the surname may be, you can also use a combination of Dear + first name + surname, but this is relatively rare. If you don’t know who exactly the recipient is going to be, you can either use Dear Sir or Madam or To whom it may concern.

Sign-offs/complimentary closures + signatures generally need to match the degree of formality/familiarity of the initial salutation, as does the overall tone of the message. The options there again range from very formal, e.g. Yours sincerely/Sincerely yours/Sincerely, via Yours, to the slightly less formal ones, e.g. Best (wishes)/Regards, to highly intimate, e.g. Take care, Cheers or Love, as well as the option to not use a sign-off at all. In case you want to signal to a recipient who you’re not familiar with yet, you can sometimes also signal your willingness to become more familiar, i.e. to switch to a first-name basis, by first using a more formal salutation, but then closing with a less formal sign-off and only your first name – instead of the more formal first name + surname – as a signature. It’s then up to the recipient to either accept this ‘offer’ in their reply or not. Finding the right salutation and complimetary closure, as well as matching them with the overall style of the message essentially requires a judgement call on your part each time you’re writing an email, at least if you’re still unfamiliar with the recipient.

The format of sign-offs and closures may also vary according to the conventions adopted by a company. If an American style of correspondence writing is adopted, both sign-off and closure may not be followed by a comma, whereas in a more European style, you would normally expect to find a comma after both of them. A further difference in style is also that the American format tends to have the date, if present explicitly in any type of correspondence, appears on a separate line and on the left-hand side of the header information, while the European format generally displays the date aligned to the right-hand side, either on a separate line, or on the first line of the correspondent’s address.

Letters of Transmittal

When a printed document of more than two or three pages, such as a report or a proposal, is sent to an organisation, it is often accompanied by a letter of transmittal. The purposes of this letter are: a) to identify the document and b) to provide some further orientation for the reader. It may also help the reader decide whether to read the full document, put it aside, file it, or send it to somebody else to follow up on.

Contents and Structure

The letter of transmittal should be short, no more than one page if possible. In the letter, you should:

• identify the document being sent and authorisation
• give a broad overview of the purposes of the document
• highlight important points about the document
• offer to discuss the document if there’s any need
• express appreciation

In the first paragraph of the your letter, you should state the reason for writing the letter in the first sentence. Specify whether you are sending a business proposal, report, information about a product or service, etc. In the second paragraph, some background information about the attached document should be provided. This may include dates by which the reader must act on the information provided within the document. If the document is rather long, you may want to provide also a brief overview/explanation of the different sections/chapters, so that the reader can go straight to the part(s) he/she is interested in. In the last paragraph, you should thank the reader for his/her time and ask him/her to contact you if there are any questions.

The following example illustrates this:

Apart from the slightly more formal formats/types of communication discussed above, sometimes even less formal electronic formats, such as SMS or IM/chatting, are also employed for quick or more immediate communication needs, especially to send reminders or arrange meetings. As you’re probably already quite familiar with these from your own personal experience, we won’t discuss these here, though.

Fill in the following table, showing what media and text types can be used for workplace communication, and which features they exhibit.

Characteristics	Memos	E-mails	Letters	SMSs & IMs
Destination
Format	To From Subject Cc Bcc Letterhead Date Address(es) Salutation Sign-off/Complimentary closure Signature Enclosures	To From Subject Cc Bcc Letterhead Date Address(es) Salutation Sign-off/Complimentary closure Signature Enclosures	To From Subject Cc Bcc Letterhead Date Address(es) Salutation Sign-off/Complimentary closure Signature Enclosures	To From Subject Cc Bcc Letterhead Date Address(es) Salutation Sign-off/Complimentary closure Signature Enclosures
Intended Audience	Colleagues Supervisors Clients Suppliers	Colleagues Supervisors Clients Suppliers	Colleagues Supervisors Clients Suppliers	Colleagues Supervisors Clients Suppliers
Language Features

References and Extended Readings

Burnett, R.E. (1997). Technical Communication (Forth Edition). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company

Gerson, S.J. & Gerson, S.M. (2012). Technical Communication: Process and Product (7th Edition). New Jersey: Prentice Hall. (Chapter 6)

---

© 2013 Martin Weisser, last edited: 25-Oct-2013 08:37:46