TYPES OF WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

TYPES OF WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

Written communication has a very large variety:

1 Letters
2 Memos
3 Telegrams
4 Tele-printer messages
5 Short reports (Informal)
6 Long reports (Formal)
7 Proposals
8 Company profiles
9 Product profiles
10 Applicant profiles or resume/ writing
11 Abstracts or Summary writing
12 Reviews and Comments
13 Minutes of meetings etc
14 Research papers

Two popular forms – letters and memos are detailed below:

(1) Letters

A letter is a written or printed personal or business message that is usually sent by a mail in an envelope. Many types of letters are in use:
 Personal and non-personal letters
 Direct, indirect and persuasive letters
 Official, demi-official (DO), formal and internal (memo) letters
 Subject letters like enquiries, orders, credit information, collection of debts, complaints, sales promotions, sales circulars, appointment of agencies etc
 Functional letters of correspondence emanate from functional departments like personnel, sales & accounting, purchasing etc

(2) Memos

Memos are intra-organization correspondence written among different departments in the same location or in different locations, factories and offices. Before word processing and other forms of electronic communication became popular, memos carried bulk of the load of written communication within a firm. One of the popular formats was that the initiator of the memo prepared it, with the help of carbon papers, in a set of three copies. The third copy was kept as a record and the set of two copies – first and second, were sent to the person to whom the message was targeted. Only the left half of the memo was written in by the sender. The receiver used the same set of papers and wrote the responses on the right half and sent it back to the initiator.

Essentially both business letters and memos serve the same purpose excepting that memos, being internal communications, were shorn of formal addressing style of business letters that are normally addressed to external customers, prospects, government and other statutory authorities,