Is it just a business letter - or a first impression?

Many times our first contact with a prospect is in written form through a letter. And although we may not be graded on our letter writing skills as in school, those that receive our letters will more than likely judge us based on our letters. It is to our advantage to send clear, concise, and visibly
attractive letters.

It used to be that letters contained a lot of "fluff" - words that were large and unnecessary. Today business letters should be objective, direct, courteous, and relatively impersonal. The information provided should be essential, clear, and concise.

The standard business letter contains six parts all on a single, unlined 8.5"x11" piece of paper. If using a second sheet of paper, there should be at least 3 to 4 lines of text. I prefer everything to be left aligned, but as described below some parts vary in alignment.

(1) Heading - This should include your return address in the upper left or right hand corner with the date below it. If you use letterhead that has your address then only include the date.

(2) Inside Address - This is the address to whom you are sending the letter. It should be left aligned and several spaces below the heading. This spacing can be altered to balance the letter on the page. The name and title of the addressee comes first (if you know this info), then on the next line comes the company name, and following lines include the address.

(3) Salutation - This should be flush left and two spaces below the inside address, and followed by a colon (a comma is okay if the letter is somewhat informal and you use a first name, i.e., Dear Diane,). The salutation should include the person's title, such as Mr., Mrs., or Ms.

(4) Body - The letter body should be single-spaced with double spaces between paragraphs. Entire body should be flush left, or you can indent 5 spaces the beginning of each paragraph. The body starts two spaces below the salutation. If the letter is more than one page long, put the addressee's name, the date, and the page number at the top of all pages after the first one. You can do this all on one line separated by commas, or type flush left in three lines at the top left corner.

(5) Complimentary Close - The close can either be flush left or in the center of the page, and followed with a comma. It is located two spaces below the last line of the body.

(6) Signature - Type the name of the sender four spaces below the complimentary close, and sign the letter by hand in the space between the complimentary close and typed name.

If the letter has enclosures, type "Enc.: title of enclosure" flush left and two spaces below typed signature.

If copies of the letter are to sent to others, type "cc.: name of recipient" flush left and two spaces below typed signature or enclosure.

Also, the grammatical errors I see most often are writing in passive voice. For example, in passive voice a sentence would read "Mistakes are sometimes made by employees." In active voice the sentence would read, "Employees sometimes make mistakes." The active voice emphasizes the doer of the action and presents ideas strongly and directly. The passive voice emphasizes the
receiver of the action, minimizing the role of the doer, and creating wordier sentences.

Remember that you can make your letter visibly appealing with bolding, italicizing, and bullets; however, don't get too carried away. Letters don't have to be boring to look at, but they shouldn't look like the comics section of the newspaper. One trick I have learned is to print the letter out and hold at arms length (you don't have to be able to read the text), and look at how the page looks like as a whole - is there equal white space all around? is it somewhat centered within the page itself? You can also do this in your word processing program by putting the view to "entire page".