Overview

An important part of your business life involves communication through letters and other correspondence. Letters offer a more formal means of communication than memos or e-mail messages. They can create a paper trail of documentation that has more credibility than e-mail, which can be altered so easily (although courts will still subpoena e-mail as well as other correspondence, for example in the Microsoft or Enron/Andersen cases).

Sometimes you will write letters as a representative of your company and sometimes you will write them on a personal level. Preparing correspondence accurately will allow you to make your point and leave the reader with a good impression. Your company may have rules or specifications for external letters that keep a degree of professionalism in the company's official correspondence. You will want to adhere to whatever standards or specifications are set by your firm.

The conventions of business letter writing allow for easy communication between individuals. The proper form and tone, as well as precision in language, are crucial. When seeking a job, a well-prepared résumé and letter of application may help you stand out from the crowd. However, in an increasingly competitive job market, it does appear that more people are coming forward with extremely polished résumés. What seems more likely is that average résumés are more easily culled from the slush piles, and job seekers must treat their résumés as marketing tools and adopt more of an attitude of sales with themselves as the commodity .

Computer and Web technology has turned this world upside down as well, especially with the rise and fall of so many huge online job sites. While they appear on the surface to facilitate job searches and applications, they may also be putting your résumé into a far bigger slush pile than it ever would have been in the days of print. Add to that equation the technology for computer scanning of thousands of résumés for combinations of keywords, and the crass might even guess that coming up with the right keywords on your résumé could be the same as stealing the answers for an upcoming test from the trash in the copy machine room. Is it cheating? Are your odds like the odds of a lottery? Or is it still who you know, same as it ever was?

In the end, face time will get you further than the ever-expanding slush pile and its look-alike ASCII résumés. How far human beings will go to allow themselves to be commodified by machines is another question entirely.