The appearance of any outgoing memo or letter will leave an impression on the recipient of the document. Therefore, you must be aware of the differences in the formatting of documents such as memos and letters. Proofreading these types of documents means that you will need to look at the spacing, alignment, and placement of special notations.
A refresher on some typing standards:
Remember that there are six single lines to one inch of vertical space
Most top-margin defaults are set to 1 inch and side-margins to 1-1/4 inches.
Letters – although there are various styles of writing business letters, the most commonly used styles are: block; modified block; simplified; and personal-business. Examples of these styles are shown on pages 214-215.
The two punctuations styles used in letters are standard (sometimes called mixed) and open. When using standard punctuation, place a colon after the salutation and a comma after the complimentary closing. Open punctuation is when there is no punctuation used after the salutation and complimentary closing.
Make sure that you pay attention to the special notations in a letter, if used. The placement of the subject line MUST be placed below the salutation. If something is to be enclosed with the letter, make sure that notation is made and that the item(s) is enclosed before mailing out the correspondence—that is the responsibility of the administrative assistant and NOT the supervisor.
Memos – when typing memos, you can type them from scratch or use the template provided in most word processing packages. The guide words (memo to, from, date, and subject) should be in all caps or just the initial letter in caps. The preference is to keep the memo in blocked format but indented paragraphs are acceptable. MAKE SURE THAT YOU PUT THE WRITER’S INITIALS AND YOUR INITIALS A DOUBLE-SPACE BELOW THE END OF THE MEMO. Many administrative assistants neglect this important part of memos and letters. Figure 12-3 on page 216 shows an example of a memo.
There are great examples of correspondence in this chapter. Look at the different styles as well as the special notations.
Correspondence that requires a second page must have a heading at the top of that page. The heading should consist of the name of the recipient of the correspondence, the page number, and the date of the correspondence. There is a one-inch top margin on this second page. Make sure that when a second page is needed that you do not leave a widow line (last line of a paragraph appears on the second page by itself) or an orphan line (first line of a paragraph appears on the first page by itself). If a paragraph needs to be broken between two pages, make sure that the first page has at least two lines on it and the second page has at least one full line with part of another on it.
12-11 Letter in block format
12-12 Memorandum
12-13 Personal Letter Without Letter head
Corrections must be made and then highlighted where they were corrected
Proofread and correct all errors
Produce the letter using mixed punctuation and following the standard procedure
For my initials it is JP Save files and send Back as J_(file name)
Save each individually
