How to write a business letter: rules and recommendations

An essential attribute of any business is business correspondence. Employees of each enterprise communicate with colleagues and customers, with suppliers and consumers. In general, the daily routine of any office necessarily includes participation in correspondence.

Despite the fact that the daily majority of employees in enterprises and organizations send and receive numerous reports, not all adhere to established norms and rules when they are created. It turns out that it is not so simple to write a business letter correctly and correctly. There are a number of requirements and templates used in the world and related to document circulation. They include the rules of writing a business letter, as well as the main points concerning the design.

When writing a message to an outside organization or simply a colleague to a neighboring department, one should adhere to a strict style (with the exception of friendly correspondence, for which there are no such restrictions). Do not use too emotional words, even to describe the entire importance of the transaction or the excitement of the tested products. A business letter should be clear, concise and sufficiently restrained.

The message should start from the addressee. If it is intended for an employee of a third-party organization, you should certainly indicate its name, the post of the recipient, as well as its full name. In the case when the document remains inside the company, it is enough to have a surname with initials (you can add the position held). A business letter to an outside organization should be issued on a letterhead (regardless of whether it will be sent electronically or in paper form). If you do not have it, you can simply specify the requisites of the sender in the "header" of the document.

Before you start to compose the text, you need to think about its structure, identify the main theses and the purpose of writing. In this case, the writing process is much simpler. To finish the letter follows the signature, which indicates not just the sender's surname, but also the position, as well as the name of the enterprise that he represents.

When sending an offer to a potential client or partner at the end, you should certainly express gratitude for the cooperation and hope for further joint work.

In addition to the rules used in business correspondence, there are also recommendations. For example, any document addressed to a particular person should be started with the words "respected" with the full name, not the initials. Do not use abbreviations in letters, for example, write "uv." Or shorten the post of the addressee, his place of work.

The most complex is considered the international document circulation, since in each state there are some nuances of communication, and the language in which it is necessary to correspond with foreign partners is not always clear to the originator of the letter, so I have to use the services of translators. Before resorting to the services of such a specialist, it should be clarified whether he knows how to write a business letter in English, or whether it is a banal literal translation. If the foreign document circulation is planned to be maintained permanently, it is better to hire an employee who has enough knowledge of a foreign language to compose a business letter on it.

In general, how the document will be drawn up and how it is formalized, the achievement of the task in many respects depends. So in any case, do not underestimate the importance of business etiquette when communicating.