Task 1 Go through the letter on page 5 and speak about its layout.

Task 2 Now look through the letter below and compare it with that on page 5. What differences do you see?

Compuvision Ltd

Warwick House Warwick Street Forest Hill London SE23 1JF   Telephone+44(0)20 8566 1861 Email staff@comvis.co.uk www. comvis.co.uk     Your ref. 6 May 20__ Our ref. DS/MR Date 11 May 20__

Ms B. Kaasen Bredgate 51 DK 1269 Copenhagen K DENMARK Dear Ms Kaasen,   Thank you for your enquiry.   I enclose our catalogue and price-list for DVD video equipment. You will find full details of the Omega range on pages 31-35.   Please contact us if you have any further questions or would like to place an order.   We look forward to hearing from you.   Yours sincerely   Mary Raynor   p.p. Donald Sampson Sales Manager   Enc.

 

Layout 2: The letter above is the company’s reply to the letter from the prospective customer in Denmark. It shows some more features of a typical business letter.

 

Letterhead

The printed letterhead contains a company’s name, address, telephone and fax numbers, email and website addresses.

 

References

References are often quoted to indicate what the letter refers to (Your ref.) and the correspondence to refer to when replying (Our ref.). References may either appear in figures, e.g. 661/17, where 661 may refer to the number of the letter and 17 to the number of the department, or in letters, e.g. DS/MR, as in the letter above, where DS stands for Donald Sampson, the writer, and MR for his assistant, Mary Raynor.

 

Per pro

The abbreviation p.p. sometimes appears in signature blocks. It means per pro i.e. for and on behalf of, and is used by administrators or personal assistants when signing letters on behalf of their managers.

 

Job title

When sending a letter or email on behalf of your company, it is a good idea to include your job title in the signature block, especially if your recipient has not dealt with you before.

 

Enclosures

If there are any documents enclosed with a letter, although these may be mentioned in the body of the letter, it is also common to write Enc. or Encl. below the signature block.

 

Layout 3: The final letter in this section (page 10) shows some further features of a business letter.

 

Private and confidential

This phrase may be written at the head of a letter and, more important, on the envelope, in cases where the letter is intended to be read only by the addressee. There are many variations of this phrase, e.g. Confidential, Strictly confidential.

 

Subject title

A subject title at the beginning of a letter directly after the salutation, provides a further reference, saves introducing the subject in the fist paragraph, immediately draws attention to the topic of the letter, and allows the writer to refer to it throughout. It is not necessary to begin the subject title with Re. (regarding to).

 

Compuvision Ltd

Warwick House Warwick Street Forest Hill London SE23 1JF   Telephone+44(0)20 8566 1861 Email staff@comvis.co.uk www. comvis.co.uk     Your ref. Our ref. DS/MR Date 16 September 20__

Ms B. Kaasen Bredgate 51 DK 1269 Copenhagen K DENMARK Private and confidential Dear Ms Kaasen,   Re. Non-payment of invoice 322/17   It appears from our records that, despite several reminders, the above invoice remains unpaid. Unless the account is cleared within 14 days from the date of this letter, we shall take legal action.   Yours sincerely   Donald Sampson   Donald Sampson Sales Manager   c.c. Messers Poole & Jackson Ltd, Solicitors

Copies

When copies are sent to people other than the named recipient, c.c. (carbon copy) is added, usually at the end of a letter, before the names of other recipients of the copies.

 

Addressing envelopes

Envelope addresses are written in the similar way to inside addresses.

 

Compuvision Ltd (1) Warwick House Warwick Street Forest Hill London SE23 1JF GREAT BRITAIN

Ms B. Kaasen (2) Bredgate 51 DK 1269 Copenhagen K DENMARK

(1)

the name and/or the organization of the sender

the street and the house number in the return address

the town and the ZIP Code of the sender

the country

 

(2)

the addressee’s name and/or the company name

the street and the house number of recipient

the town and the ZIP Code in the mailing address

the country

Mind that there might be variations in the positioning of the street and the house number; the town and the ZIP Code.