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Hi, this is Prof. Lipuma of the New Jersey Institute of Technology, recording for my Technical Communications class.
And I’ll be drawing on information from my text, Fundamentals of Undergraduate Education and Learning.
What we’re looking at today is a discussion of some specific rhetorical situations that you might run into that have commonly
accepted forms and different purposes behind why you would use them as you create your package.
What we’re really going to talk about is really letters and memos, and how memos are an old form of what has become the modern idea of emails.
So let’s begin first with a discussion of some simple ideas. What is this that we’re talking about?
Well, when you want to communicate, usually on a daily basis, something short, there are lots of different ways you can do it.
Back in the day when there was no email, no computers and you had nothing to do; you would sit down and hand write a letter.
And there were lots of different kinds of letters people talk about: business letters, legal correspondent, and a number of different technical writing styles of letters.
Thank-you letters, recommendation letters, complaint letters, cover letters, and transmittal letters.
And we’ll begin to talk about this more later but the idea here is that all of these letters can have a
standard basic template or format you can fill in with the appropriate content. That’s what we want to look at.
Now usually, letters were considered more formal and more external so that if
You were not part of the group, you would send them a business letter.
There was friend letters, which are far less formal and still held some of the same basic
conventions of where to put your address, where to sign it, and things like that.
This is all been modernized with the advent of the technology so that it looks a little different than it was .
Internal communications, which can also be formal or informal, was usually handle by memos such that
since you were part of the group and they seemingly knew who you were, you could leave out
a lot of that formal addressing and just get right to the bullet points that you needed to be had.
From that basic heading, we arrived at emails and if you look at the heading of an email
It’ll be very similar to what you see in a memo because that was the internal form that was decided.
You wouldn't just send blanket emails saying to anyone in the beginning and that was the form.
Now, there are other forms of your daily short-term communication: faxes, Twitter, text messaging – we’re not going to discuss those now.
Though in the text, you can see the links to some kinds of information that will relate to those.
No matter what kind of communication you’re doing, when you’re writing, again, you have to consider
your target and situation, and your goal as you create your package. And
You realized that being professional is not something you only do when you’re paying attention and talking to your boss.
Anytime you create a document, it may be passed along to someone that you did not initially intend.
So be aware that these kinds of things matter. So now let’s look at some basic letter forms.
What we want to think about is that a letter is broken into three basic sections, there's
Top – or the opening, the body – which contains the content and the meat of what you want to say, and then the closing.
For the opening, there are some commonly agreed upon elements. It should always have a date and the date should be at the top and the most important.
Then you have whom you’re sending it to, which is the target’s address.
And then you have, in this case, we put a recipient and you need have a greeting for that person.
Usually, it’s Dear Mr., Mrs. , or Ms. Person ended with a colon.
There can be other information there and in the old letter formats, they would put your mailing address also at the top
so that it could be put into either a windowed envelope or retyped if it was being sent out and typed up by a secretary.
That’s not as important these days because most things are not done by hand anymore.
Computers merge files and handle all of this stuff.
When someone reads your letter, they’re probably looking for an email, phone number, or some other kind of contact information.
So now the body, as we said, contains content. But then we have to think about
Your closing. Your closing is now the place where you have all of your contact information. So
The first thing you want to do in the closing is close the letter. This is usually
"Sincerely", "Yours Truly", or "Best". Be careful using too much of an emotional or personal
Closing. For example, and this is how you wouldn't say "With Love"
You also may want to be careful not to use religious things such as "God bless you". Though
that may be appropriate if that's what you believe. But please realize that some targets will not
take kindly to this. They will look at it as something problematic.
Then, there's usually a space given where you would sign your name. Then, you actually put your name. And then
Your contact information. And then at the very bottom of the letter, if you have anything to be attached to this
You can put attachment and closure, followed by a colon.
There are many different forms for this and you can look at any kind of online or in-print
Technical writing or letter writing book to find very specifics. But one of the things you want to look at here is that
This is a general style that's existed for many, many years.
What we want to do is move into what would be considered the modern blocked-left format cover letter.
In this case, all of the information is aligned to the left, with no double-spacing, no indents, and an extra return between paragraphs.
Again, as we said, the first thing we need is your opening and the most important part of the opening is the date.
We have the letter and that goes at the top. If that date is on the left, it usually signifies a block left.
And all of the information associated with it will be down the left side.
If your date is tabbed over so it's center, then your closing, and your closing information
and your contact information with your name should align with the date.
It should not be centered. You never use centered. But what we're saying is that you would tab over
so that it has a left margin, but moved to the middle. Never, ever, ever use a right justified or full justified part in a letter.
That is not with this is meant for. Now after you have your heading
In older letter styles, as I said, on the right side, they would put your mailing address.
Except in the modern age, most people don't expect to get replies via mail. Or if they do, it would be verified.
So, part of what we want to see is that in a general letter, the next most important thing is who you're sending it to.
Their name, and their full title, if possible. If it's not a full title, it's whatever title you have.
Their department, their company, their street address, and the city and state.
Please note, do not write out state names. Do not write out New Jersey, put NJ.
For some reason, a lot of students, when they're addressing letters, don't understand this and write it out.
Perhaps, it comes due to international things or not knowing the state's abbreviation. But please
In a letter, make it look like the mailing address addressing on the letter cover.
If for some reason you do not have this information, try to get as much of it as you can. If you don't have a person's name
To send your letter to, get a department name. If you do not have a department name, make something general.
Such as "Hiring Manager" or "Complaint Manager".
The idea here is that the more you can connect this letter to a target, the more likely it will be looked at.
Now after you have these two things, you need to put a greeting so that the person knows who you talking to.
Dear Mr, Mrs, Ms, followed by a colon. That's a business opening.
Now, at the bottom, one thing we have to see is that this information is much longer than traditional.
Years ago, the only thing you had was your name,and your address. Now, people have
Name, Address, Phone Number at Home, Phone Number at Cell, Phone number at Work, fax number,
An email address, a web page, you know a Twitter account - There are hundreds of things you can here so by
Putting it at the bottom of the letter, you allow yourself to put as many lines as you need. And take them out or adjust them very easily.
It also makes all of your contact information together.
Part of the reason why we like this modern block-left flow is that it allows the reader to come in at the top, sees it's addressed to them, and read
And get to your body and your content before they know who is sending it to them. Which in many cases is important for students
Because they don't know who you are, they may get rid of it. If you can quickly get them into your notification
it will be more important to get it down to the bottom. Since we're looking at this as a modern letter format
One of the most common uses for students is in resumes, as a cover letter - this allows you to bridge the bottom
of your cover letter, with the top of your resume because the contact information will be continuous from one to the next.
At least, you have some way of bringing cohesion to the two documents. But now
we have to get to the meat of the letter. All of this was part of the package that will allow you to get
your target to pay attention it and bring the letter to the right place, the right address.
And if they want to respond, they'll do it. So what do we have to put in middle?
Well, there's three parts you want to put. In the first, you need some sort of introduction, connection, relationship and purpose.
So the idea is that this first paragraph is meant to connect you and the reason to write this letter with the target
so that they understand. You must be direct and you must not add in extra verbage.
Many times the letter begins, I'm writing regarding or in writing to, or I'm writing in response to
Because you want to be very direct about what it is, so as soon as they start reading, they can get that message.
If you make it difficult to figure out why you're writing, many people will just stop.
The second paragraph is the one that is perhaps the most important for getting your message aboard.
And this cane be one or more paragraphs in the middle, depending on how much you have to say.
But, this is the information paragraph that provides details and focus. If
For example, this is a cover letter of a resume, this would be where you would bridge your introduction of who you are.
with what you have on your resume that is appropriate for this company, the job posting or whatever.
And as we go further into resumes and cover letters later, you'll see this. But for here, these middle paragraphs are
Where you put in the information that is meant to accomplish your task.
To convince the person, to persuade them, to influence them. This is where that has to go.
Now, there is one more paragraph that a lot of students forget about and this is the call to action
That last part is the idea that you were giving instructions and directions to the person to the target doing that let's them know what you want to do.
If you're writing a compliant, you have to give them some clear course of action that you'd like them to follow to remedy your complaint.
If you're writing a thank you letter, you're perhaps asking "Please let me know if there's any other openings."
If you're writing a cover letter, you're saying "Please review my resume."
If you were writing an application letter, where you're saying "Please send an application" or you know, "at your earliest convenience, I like to arrange an interview."
You need a very clear, specific and concise statement of what you want.
This is also the place where you can then put a bridge into your closing by saying thank you
for your time. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at the address listed below.
Because you have all the information below, you give them the option of what to do.
Alright, this is a basic letter and I'd like to a minute and show you a letter formatted.
Now again, one of the dilemmas here is that I'm trying to use PowerPoint to show this to you.
But you can see the flow the basic flow of the format, very clearly put through. In this letter, three paragraphs
All to the left extra spaces separating them and it moves from top to bottom very clearly, and easily.
Alright, now we have to go on to memos. The memo format is similar but different because it really has a header and a body.
There is no need for conclusion because all of your information about who you are, who it's going to is in the header.
It's assumed that you already know that person and so then the body is simply contains the details
of what you need to talk about and how you need to talk about it. Memos can be very short as a letter , only a page.
Or, they can go on for hundreds of pages if they need to. Usually you wouldn't consider that a memo.
Usually, that's part of an executive summary. But the idea is that the opening heading simply begins a statement.
Most memos should not go beyond three to five pages. Now what do we need to look at? The heading.
The heading contains four vital pieces of information at add a minimum. The to, the from, the date, and the subject line.
As I said before, this very much mirrors what in an email. Now in any email, you have other options as well.
And you can put those on that on a resume. Besides the "To" line, which should contain the name, if possible, the title
for each of your targets, you may want to have a CC line, which means a carbon copy.
Back in the day when they would type one of these, it would be pages of carbon copies and they would have to tell you who else they went to.
In terms of a memo, a carbon copy says this was not meant to go to this person, but it was supplied to them as reference
so they were included in the discussion. The "From" Line, if it's from you, and if it's from more than one to do it
In some companies, if you are producing a memo for official purposes, they will ask you to sign by the "From" line.
So that it is clear the someone else should just make this for you, but that your initial gives note that you saw and agreed to what's contained in the middle.
The date, of course, helps us know how where this is, and then finally the subject line.
Unfortunately, many people are too vague in their subject memo. That doesn't help us.
We know this is a memo because at the top of the page, it says memorandum or memo, usually centered but sometimes to the left.
What we need in the subject line is a detailed description of what the memo covers and why you are saying it.
So if this is a memo regarding a job posting that has to be put on the company's website
They should say that. It should give as much detail posting title name and things like that.
Beyond this, there could be other things that you include but at a minimum
These are the four basic elements you want to give in a letter.
One thing that we need to mention is since this is a written document, not an electronic document
There are certain things that you can do in an e-mail that you wouldn't do in a memo. A memo cannot have an attachment
and that's a paper attachment and usually you would put in the starting line attachment. With an electronic e-mail, you can simply click on attachment
The other thing you can do with the e-mail is that you can't do with a memo is considered a blind carbon copy.
What that means is that you send someone, to their email address, is the copy it's listed to.
You can do that with a memo simply by making a photocopy of it and handing it to them and saying "I didn't tell anyone you have this."
The same basic ideas exist, except in e-mail that you're used to seeing, they're codified in a different way.
So this gives you a basic understanding of letters , memos, and the block format. Again the body of the memo was going to be same as for the letter such that it is all block left.