Letters Everywhere Part 1

Parts of the letter

1. Letter Head
2. Dateline
3. Inside Address
4. Salutation
5. Body of the Letter
6. Signature
7. Complementary Clause
8. Notation

There are 3 kinds of letter

• Business Letter
• Personal Letter
• Social Letter

Business Letter

         we used this kind of letter when writing:

1. To give one's opinions to public officials
2. To place an order with a store
3. To apply for a job
4. To seek admission to a college

this is the format of a business letter

from: http://jobsearchtech.about.com/library/graphics/block-letter-parts.gif

Personal Letter

A personal letter is a type of letter which provides communication between a small number of people, usually two. There are many types of personal letters and they are written for a wide variety of reasons:

• One person wishes to attain information from an individual or a business.
• One person wishes to tell somebody about themselves, as in pen pals.
• One person wishes to present to an individual or a business a social note, such as a thank-you or a congratulations.
• One person wishes to communicate with an acquaintance - friend or family, for example in order to maintain and reinforce the bond between them.

Surviving personal letters are often an important source of information about the lives of historical figures.

from:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_letter

sample format of a personal letter:

from:http://www.goodletterwriting.co.uk/letter-writing-images/personal-letter-example.png

Social Letter

The Social Letters which are written to relations and intimate friends should be written in an easy, conversational style. The Social letters are really of the nature of friendly chat: and, being as a rule unpremeditated and spontaneous compositions, they are informal and free-and-easy as compared with essays. Just as in friendly talks, as in friendly letters, we can touch on many subjects and in any order we like. And we can use colloquial expressions which would in formal essays be quite out of place. But this does not mean that we can be careless and slovenly in dashing off our letters. For, it is insulting to ask a friend to decipher a badly written, ill-composed and confusing scrawl.

The Social Letters which are written to relations and intimate friends should be written in an easy, conversational style.So, it must for us to take care and preserve some order in expressing our thoughts. Above all, it must be remembered that, however free-and-easy may be our style, we are as much bound by the rules of spelling, punctuation, grammar and idiom in writing a letter as we are in writing the most formal letter.

The Social Letters which are written to relations and intimate friends should be written in an easy, conversational style.Such ungrammatical expressions as “an advice, those sort of things and he met my brother and I” are not permissible both in a friendly letter and in a business letter. Mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar at once stamp a letter-writer as uneducated.

Forms of address: 

In Social Letters to relations and intimate friends, use the proper form of address.

The proper form of address is the name (without title) of the person to whom you are writing, prefixed by such qualifying terms as Dear, My Dear, Dearest etc…

For examples:

Dear Father,

Dear Mother,

Dear Brother,

Dearest Sister,

Dear Edward,

My Dear Bill,

But if you are writing to an ordinary person who is much older than you are, or of superior rank, it is respectful to use a prefix like Mr., Mrs., Ms. Etc…The Social-letters which are written to relations and intimate friends should be written in an easy, conversational style.

from:http://www.english-for-students.com/Social-letters.html

here is a sample format of a Social letter: