Enterprise Letters: Maintain Them Short and For the Point
Copyright ? Shaun R. Fawcett
In case you ever draft letters, or any other documents where brevity is essential, you’ll wish to pay close attention to these tiny practical “tricks from the trade”.
The following is an abridged excerpt from a chapter I have included inside a couple of my Writing Kits.
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Any person who has read any of my articles on the subject of letter writing or resume writing will know how critical I believe it truly is to minimize the number of pages, preferably limiting them to a single page wherever attainable.
And all of us know how tacky it looks when we put the finishing touches on a letter and it overflows onto the second page by one or two lines. Quite unprofessional!
So, there are numerous handy tiny tricks that I’ve used over the years that may aid ?squeeze? a letter or other document onto a single page without having it getting noticed by the typical reader. These tricks may be applied utilizing any regular word processing software program.
I?m not certain regardless of whether a purist at a secretarial school would approve of a few of my strategies given that they may deviate from particular technical standards, but I have utilised them hundreds of occasions and no one has ever been the wiser. The primary point becoming that I was in a position to maintain a letter on one page when the very first version overflowed by a number of lines onto a second page.
Beneath are my ?page compression tips?, listed in the order in which I recommend you apply them:
1. Move both the left and right margins out about 1/4 in. closer for the edge from the page.
2. Move the best and bottom margins out about 1/4 in. closer towards the edge in the page.
3. Edit out the one or two word ?overflows?. What I imply right here is this: Right after the letter is drafted take a superb appear at every paragraph. See if you can find any that have an ending sentence that ?overflows? onto an additional line for the sake of one word. If so, make a minor edit or two within the paragraph that shortens it somewhat so that the last word or two will not overflow onto the following line. Making use of this approach, you can often obtain two or three additional lines inside an one-page letter.
4. Adjust the line spacing on the page. You can obtain considerable space on a page by adjusting the line spacing of the text. For example, in the event the default line spacing is set to ?single? at 12 points try setting it to ?exactly? at 12 points in case your font size is 12. If that doesn?t do it, attempt ?exactly? at ?11 pts?. Typically you’ve to experiment a little with this a single to have the appear just right.
5. As a final resort, try lowering the size in the font by 1 point size, say from 12 to 11 points.
6. If it still doesn?t ?fit?, there?s one particular final point you are able to attempt if you?re the author with the letter. Go back and edit it one more time. Appear for redundant thoughts and phrases, or those that will be combined into a single sentence rather than two. Is each word and phrase completely essential to your message? You?ll be amazed at the space savings that this procedure can lead to.
As I said earlier, attempt the above methods in sequence, one-at-a-time, checking every single time to determine in case your newest change has carried out the trick for you.
What happens if it nonetheless won?t fit?
Now, if you?ve utilised all of the above tricks and you still can?t get the letter to fit onto a single page, it?s time to admit that you?ve got a true two-pager. In which situation, you need to then believe about ?reversing? some of the compression tricks that you applied once you tried to ?squeeze? the letter, and after that focus on making a balanced looking second page.
There?s nothing worse looking than a letter with an one particular or two sentence second page! So within this case, you might desire to in fact ?stretch? the letter out a bit.
Often, at this stage I actually enhance the line spacing and decrease the margins slightly in order that there is going to be a decent sized overflow onto the second page.
As an example, try reversing methods 1, 2 and 4 above. So rather than decreasing the top, bottom and side margins on page one particular, try growing them by 1/4 in. all around. Then increase the point size and see if that aids. Ideally, try and get the page to break cleanly at a paragraph break, for a nice tidy page-to-page transition.
Once again, I have utilized these little ?compression? tricks thousands of occasions, and no one has ever pulled out their ruler and chastised me for inaccuracy.
The important point will be to wind up with a specialist “looking” letter.
Actually, if you do a really detailed verify in the real-life templates integrated in any among my Writing Toolkits you would discover that I’ve used a single or more in the above tricks on many of them. But, I?m not telling which ones!
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