Letters, memos, and e-mails­ serve an important role in the business world. They are avenues to communication outside of face to face, instant messaging, or the time honored phone call.

LETTERS:

Letters are the oldest of these three methods for communication, and the most formal. A letter is signed, and thus there is an added credibility to the method that makes a letter ideal for legal documents or anything that needs verification. The downside to a letter is the time it takes to travel from one location to the next.

Traditionally, in business, a letter symbolized that the communication was traveling outside the business organization that it originated, but this “rule” has changed somewhat.

MEMOS:

Traditionally memorandums were used for short internal communications that were delivered by hand or placed into a company’s internal “mail” service. Memorandums are less formal than letters as well as typically shorter with elements of the text often represented in bullet points to increase the speed at which the memo can be read.

E-MAIL:

E-mails are a fairly new source of communication between business professionals and the exact rules for writing a e-mail are still quite blurry. Typically, most people treat an e-mail like a memo. The primary advantage to an e-mail over letters and memos is the speed at which they arrive.