Enterprise Letters: Preserve Them Short and For the Point
Copyright ? Shaun R. Fawcett
In case you ever draft letters, or any other documents where brevity is very important, you’ll wish to pay close focus to these tiny practical “tricks in the trade”.
The following is an abridged excerpt from a chapter I’ve included within 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 understand how important I believe it is to reduce the number of pages, preferably limiting them to a single page wherever possible.
And we all know how tacky it looks when we put the finishing touches on a letter and it overflows onto the second page by 1 or two lines. Quite unprofessional!
So, there are several handy tiny tricks that I’ve utilized over the years that will aid ?squeeze? a letter or other document onto one particular page with no it getting noticed by the typical reader. These tricks could be applied utilizing any normal word processing software plan.
I?m not certain regardless of whether a purist at a secretarial school would approve of a few of my approaches given that they may deviate from particular technical standards, but I have used them hundreds of occasions and no one has ever been the wiser. The main point becoming that I was capable to keep 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 within the order in which I recommend you apply them:
1. Move both the left and correct margins out about 1/4 in. closer for the edge from the page.
2. Move the prime 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 good look 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 inside the paragraph that shortens it somewhat to ensure that the last word or two will not overflow onto the following line. Employing this approach, you can frequently obtain two or three additional lines inside an one-page letter.
4. Adjust the line spacing on the page. You are able to obtain considerable space on a page by adjusting the line spacing of the text. For example, if 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 get the look just right.
5. As a last resort, try minimizing 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 thing you are able to attempt if you?re the author of the letter. Go back and edit it 1 much 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 totally essential for your message? You?ll be amazed at the space savings that this method can lead to.
As I stated earlier, attempt the above methods in sequence, one-at-a-time, checking each time to determine if your most recent change has carried out the trick for you personally.
What occurs if it nonetheless won?t fit?
Now, if you?ve utilised all of the above tricks and you nonetheless can?t get the letter to fit onto a single page, it?s time to admit that you?ve got a real two-pager. In which situation, you ought to then feel about ?reversing? some of the compression tricks which you applied once you tried to ?squeeze? the letter, then focus on creating a balanced looking second page.
There?s nothing worse looking than a letter with an one particular or two sentence second page! So in this case, you could want to actually ?stretch? the letter out a bit.
Often, at this stage I actually increase the line spacing and minimize the margins slightly so that there is going to be a decent sized overflow onto the second page.
As an example, try reversing steps 1, 2 and 4 above. So rather than decreasing the leading, bottom and side margins on page one, try rising 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, to get a great tidy page-to-page transition.
Yet again, I have utilised these small ?compression? tricks thousands of instances, and nobody has ever pulled out their ruler and chastised me for inaccuracy.
The essential factor is to end up having an expert “looking” letter.
The truth is, should you do an extremely comprehensive examine with the real-life templates included in any one of my Writing Toolkits you’d uncover that I’ve utilized one or a lot more with the above tricks on several of them. But, I?m not telling which ones!
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