The structure, style and content of your letters should follow several principles of good business communication. If you are to present your best professional self, your letters should adhere to some fundamental guidelines. These deal with several basic structural elements, such as the use of salutations, enclosures, and postscripts, to more stylistic concerns, such as designing fully-blocked, square-blocked, modified blocked, or semi-blocked letters.
These rules also deal with the choice of language and phrases to best convey your message. Taken together, these rules deal with a variety of questions raised by letter writers concerning how they should best craft and present their message on paper.
Many letter writers neglect the importance of style and thus produce unattractive letters that literally distract from the central message being conveyed in the letter. The message is often crammed in small type at the top of the page with very narrow margins. Such unattractive letters communicate an overall impression of being unprofessional.
The layout and design of your letter should be relatively conservative. Avoid fancy fonts and extensive use of italics, bold, and graphic elements. When listing items or emphasizing several points, use of bullet points is appropriate.
The internal structure of your letter will vary depending on your purpose. In general however, most business letters incorporate these basic elements: heading, date line, inside address, salutation or greeting, body of letter, closing, signature line, enclosures. Other elements such as copy reference etc may also need to be incorporated.
The body of the letter should contain a polite yet powerful message designed to quickly motivate the reader to take action. Divide the body of your letter into three or four simple, focused and energetic paragraphs. A single paragraph tends to be too condensed to convey three or four key thoughts that should be included in your letter.
Above all, the body of your letter must be a quick read that makes the reader pause to invest more time in you. Keep in mind that similar to your CV, your letter is likely to be quickly scanned or skimmed rather than slowly read word for word, thought for thought. While you may spend a great deal of time crafting each word, phrase and paragraph on the assumption that the reader will consume everything you say, in reality, your reader will probably spend no more than 20 to 30 seconds scanning the letter for key thoughts and words.
In so doing, he or she may only read 30 percent of what appears in your letter. But if the opening sentence and paragraph are particularly engaging, the reader may decide to invest more time in consuming your letter.
Knowing this, your paragraphs should evolve like this:
The first paragraph must grab attention. It must connect you to the reader immediately. In effect, the very first sentence should function similarly to a good news headline - it grabs attention and generates enough interest to motivate the reader to invest more time in reading the rest of your letter.
The second paragraph should emphasize your key accomplishments in relationship to the employer’s needs. These need to be specific and reinforced with appropriate examples.
The third and fourth paragraphs move from accomplishments to actions. Specify what actions you desire and what action you plan to take, be it a follow up telephone call, or a request for an interview.
The content needs logical connection between paragraphs, and must flow smoothly.
Each paragraph should encompass a separate but related idea. Keep focused on your central purpose and avoid extraneous information that does not reinforce your central purpose or which raises questions about your professionalism. Keep the content interesting, energetic, and active by using lots of action verbs. Speak to your readers as if you were in a face-to-face conversation.
Keep each paragraph relatively short — a total of five lines with two or three sentences per paragraph, and keep each sentence relatively short as long sentences are difficult to follow, can be awkward and, irritating if they need re-reading.
One final point of advice is that you must avoid any negative remarks about people or any untoward activity at your present place of work. I have read letters where the writer has explained their desire to move on because they have uncovered a fraud or some other sharp practice. This alone is unacceptable, but a few have actually named the people.
Remember that libel is a criminal offence.
(Based in Dubai, David Thatcher, [email protected], is managing director of career management firm Bernard Haldane Associates in the Middle East.)
