Introduction to Letters - Informal and Formal Letters



Letters, we all are familiar with them.  Even if you have never used them,  you do come across them at least once a day, if not several times, in the form of letters themselves, letter boxes, post offices, courier offices, men & vehicles delivering them, etc. All this reminds us, and as we discuss this later at some point in this blog post, of how still important letters are in modern times.

Letters, formal and informal, are considered to be one of the oldest forms of written communication. Both formal and informal letters have briefly been explained in the following paragraphs. But because our blog mostly deals with the formal type, we have only included a short account of informal version.

Let us first start with the informal, so that afterwards we can discuss formal letters at length.

Informal Letters:

These include letters sent to friends, relatives and distant family members. It may also include people with whom your relationship initiated as formal but some part of which later transitioned into informal.


Remember that unlike formal letters, informal letters are only guarded by a single principle i.e. Ethics. By 'guard' we mean 'necessity of use'. Principles that guard formal letters are briefly mentioned in the section of 'formal letters'. So stay tuned.

 The principle of ethics in this case may require you to send an informal message but it does not require this message to be in the form of a letter. And thus because letter is a mode of communication and not the communication itself, is the primary answer to the question that why the use of informal letters have reduced significantly in modern times. Other reasons that contributed to the cause of its reduction include its cost, time it takes to reach its recipient, wrong postal address or other errors/mistakes due to which it never reached its intended recipient, and its modern day alternatives that are almost free, deliver messages within seconds, and in 99.999% cases reaches the intended recipient. These alternatives include email, instant messaging apps, social networking websites, audio/video calling apps, etc.

Formal Letters:

Formal letters are also as old as informal letters. And as the name suggests, they are only used for official correspondence. This correspondence may be between the following:

 1.       Organization ‘A’ and Organization ‘B’.

 2.       Person and organization, and vice versa.

 3.       Person and person. For example, a reminder from the area internet provider who is a sole-proprietor to his client asking for payment of dues.

 Even though modern day alternatives such as email and fax are now also used for formal communication, ‘use of letters for official purposes is still widely popular and acceptable to great extent’. This is because unlike informal letters in which case the message was independent of letter (read this explanation in the informal letters section) and only obeys ethical principle, formal message is dependent upon the letter for several good reasons. 

 These are briefly mentioned below:

Writing a business letter

Writing a business letter is a creative job that requires planning, research about facts to be included, analyzing and organizing the researched information, writing an original draft, reviewing and rewriting the original draft and its presentation when finalizing it.
The process of writing a business letter can be divided into three components, all of which require equal consideration. These are:

 1.       Using a proper professional format of a business letter.

 2.       Knowing the general key points of a business letter.

 3.       Knowing the category specific key points of a business letter.

 These three components have been discussed at length on separate pages to ease our readers. Use the below ‘Related Topics’ section to visit them.

Related topics

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