Temas De Ingles

Formal and Informal Letters
Purpose
Differences between business letters and the less formal format and style of friendly or personal letters can be found in the structure of a proper businessletter.

Business letters should follow strict guidelines for style and form. Key elements such as layout, paragraph structure and technical formatting differentiate a proper business letter from aless formal personal letter.

When writing an informal letter, the recipient of the letter is often known to you.
If you are sending a formal letter to a person or company, you usually will not befamiliar with the recipient. In this case, the quality of the content is entirely responsible for getting your message across and making a good impression on the reader.

Structure
There are severalparts to the structure of formal letters.

Informal letters have little structure other than a greeting, a main body and a conclusion. A formal letter has the address of the person you are writing toat the top left side of the page with a suitable greeting one line underneath. Write your own address on the top right of the page with the date underneath. Sign your name under a suitableconclusion, which follows the main body of the letter. Finally, print your name below your signature.

Greeting and Complimentary Close
You can greet the recipient of an informal letter in any way that youfeel is appropriate. When you write a greeting in a formal letter, it must follow salutation rules. Use "Dear Sirs," for unknown recipients. If you know the recipient's name, use "Dear Mr./Ms./Mrs....." . When using the greeting "Dear Sirs," you must close your letter "Yours faithfully," whereas "Yours sincerely," should be used if you have written the name of the recipient.

Content
It is goodpractice to split the main body of a formal letter into three parts. Begin with an introductory paragraph that concisely describes the purpose of the letter. Following this, the main body describes...