Page 151 - How to write effective business English your guide to excellent professional communication by Fiona Talbot

140 How to Write Effective Business English

salutation is ‘Yours faithfully’ according to UK English convention. In
US English your letter could end with ‘Sincerely’ or ‘Best regards’ or
‘Yours truly’.
If you know the person’s name, use it in your opening saluta-
tion: for example, ‘Dear Mr Smith’ (or Mrs Smith, Ms Smith, Miss
Smith). This is the formal use of their surname. Or you can write
‘Dear Yusuf’ (or Sara, etc); this is the informal use of their first
name. When you end the letter, you write ‘Yours sincerely’ rather
than ‘Yours faithfully’.
Where possible, try to find out the name of the person to whom
you are writing. Naturally, some situations will always stay formal,
keeping to the ‘Dear Sir or Madam’ formula. But as relationship
building can be crucial to business success today, it’s really worth-
while personalizing your letter writing.

Open punctuation

You or your company choose whether you use open punctuation in
business letters today. This simply means that you can have a
comma after the opening salutation (‘Dear ...’), or you can omit it.
The same applies to your sign-off (‘Yours ...’). Whichever option
you choose, be consistent in both the salutation and the sign-off.

When flexibility is key, you need

to adapt letter-writing templates

Although I’ve shown a standard format, effective business letter-writing
is getting more creative. As circumstances change, we need to adapt
each writing task. So when it comes to letter-writing you need to de-
sign templates that work for you and be prepared to change them as
business expectations evolve. I’ll shortly be showing you some crea-
tive sub-headings used effectively to illustrate what I mean.
First, be aware that although companies increasingly deal with
customer complaints via social media rather than by letter (as we