1.5 Common Business Documents and Their Uses

“Communication” is related to the word “community,” and different business communities set the standards for how they approach communication. This includes business documents. We’ll finish our first topic with a discussion of some common business documents and their use. Depending on when and where you’ve worked in the past, some of these will be familiar, while others may not. We’ll talk about the basics here to get you familiar enough that you can recognize and use them without any trouble. These points will be helpful for many circumstances, but it’s up to us to learn to recognize exactly when and how they apply, and when they don’t.

First, some words of advice about business documents. In previous generations—and by that we mean prior to the widespread adoption of computers and the internet—business documents used to have much more standard formats and well-defined uses. This isn’t really the case any longer. Depending on the employer, for example, we wouldn’t now consider it unusual to receive a job offer via text message, when in the past an organization would have communicated that same offer in a mailed letter on official stationery. The ease of creating and modifying documents by computer, along with the general informalization of work practices brought about by the internet, have caused rapid changes in how business documents are used and which ones are thought to be acceptable for certain purposes.

For that reason, all the guidance in this section comes with the following warning: it depends on where you are, and who you’re communicating with. An email is by far the most common business document, but it’s only possible to give very general instructions about appropriate ways to write and use that document. Beyond those general instructions, everything you need to know about email will be determined by how people in your organization and in your field use email. We’ve all received emails written so formally that it’s like the English royal family is coming to visit; on the other hand, who hasn’t gotten an email whose subject line is blank and all it says is “metting in 5”? Both documents are emails, but they serve such different audiences and purposes that they really have nothing in common besides being emails.

A key skill we’ll develop in this course is the ability to discern the conventions, or rules, that people around you are following in their communications. Once we understand those conventions, we can mold our behavior to fit them and do things the way other people are doing them, rather than trying to enforce the “correct” rules we learned in previous careers or in a business communication course. There are very few universally correct rules for business communication, and apart from things like be clear, avoid offense or harassment, and keep your audience in mind, there might be none. The correct rules are the ones that a situation calls for—and so, while there are general principles of successful communication, the rules you use depend on where you are and who you’re communicating with.

Résumés and CVs

The first business document is the résumé. Sometimes spelled “resume,” a résumé is a summary of your work experience and qualifications for particular positions. In some places outside the US the term “CV” may be more common. CV stands for curriculum vitae, a Latin phrase meaning “course or span of life.” Some fields inside the US, such as many areas of academia, also call this document a CV.

A résumé or CV gives a brief summary of your education, your professional positions, your qualifications, and relevant skills. The most common practice is to list your most recent position or educational attainment first, along with a brief description of job duties or projects completed. Previous positions then follow, again with the more recent listed first.

The precise format your résumé takes is up to you, but remember that everything is communication. The words on your résumé communicate your experience, but the résumé’s format communicates something about your own personal style and can even indicate whether you understand norms within your field, such as whether résumés are usually short or long.

If you need to create a résumé or are looking to update a current one, the safest bet is to ask a few successful colleagues for copies of theirs to see what they have done. If one strikes you as interesting or attention-grabbing, ask yourself why, and then add that feature to your own. You can also use someone’s résumé to create a template, or a skeleton of the document, to which you would add your own information and experience. Résumés are generally considered to be public documents, and it isn’t unethical to copy the format of someone’s résumé in order to create your own.

You should never try to pass off someone else’s experience as your own, however, nor should you ever make up experience or education you don’t have. It’s common to describe past work projects in fanciful terms to make your background seem more exciting than it actually is, but dreaming up a college degree you didn’t earn or a management position you didn’t have will likely end in you getting discovered and possibly fired.

Here are some other guidelines for successful résumés:

• Don’t be afraid of white space. A résumé chock-full of text from top to bottom suggests that its author isn’t confident enough in their own experience to let a simple description of that experience speak for itself. Boldly state your qualifications and achievements in direct language, and be brave enough to leave it alone after that. In addition, a well-organized résumé with appropriate spacing between lines and sections has more visual appeal and is much easier to read.

• The more specific, the better, including numbers. Did you grow your company’s customer base by 50%? Then write that, instead of just that you grew the company’s customer base. Particular facts, project titles, coding languages, dollar values, and other numbers give concrete evidence of your ability. Name them, and avoid vague descriptions that could be true of any other job candidate.

• Brag. Your résumé is your professional profile, and it should tell people exactly how much value you will deliver—a lot! A résumé isn’t the time for modesty. Own your accomplishments and communicate them to your audience.

• The shorter, the better. If you can clearly and appealingly communicate your most valuable contributions in a single page, then do it. Filling a position requires many employers to sift through hundreds of résumés, and a brief, compelling document will have the widest appeal.

• Do what others are doing. Don’t copy others’ experience, but learn from the way they describe it. Do people in your field tend to create résumés with a particular format? Learn that format, and learn to work within those constraints to make yourself stand out.

• Don’t lie. We mentioned this above, but it’s worth repeating. Exaggerated descriptions of boring work might be expected, but lying could have serious consequences.

As before, we should take all these guidelines in the context of our particular organization, field, or profession. Long CVs are the norm in academia, for example, and tech- or code-oriented résumés might include things like links to GitHub repositories or other projects. The exact content and format of your résumé depends on where you are and who you’re communicating with. Audience expectations regarding these documents will trump almost any general guideline given here or elsewhere.

Email

Without question, the most common document in contemporary business practice is the email. Emails are easy and quick to write, they cost nothing to send, they transmit fast, and they leave a permanent record. Almost everything about them is customizable—besides having a recipient, a subject line, and a place for the rest of the text, everything about them can be changed. Fonts, colors, images, videos, links, and other things are all whatever you want them to be in an email.

This almost infinite flexibility means, however, that rules for email use are even more discipline- and community-dependent than those for résumés. What’s more, the relationship you have to an organization or to the recipient of the email matters a great deal, and might even be the only relevant factor in determining the format and formality of your email communication: when you know someone well, an email can be just a few words, all misspelled; when you don’t know someone at all, you have to take a completely different approach.

As for résumés, there is a safe and worry-free way to handle email communication, regardless of the circumstances. The first step is to use the template below, which strikes a middle ground between too informal and excessively formal:

Don’t worry about the content of this email—the important thing is how it’s set up and what each part accomplishes. First, the font is a standard sans serif typeface that’s easy to read. The default font setting on Gmail is similar to this one, and it works well in many circumstances. Second, a greeting of “Dear ______” is a neutral, all-purpose way of beginning an email to any recipient.

After the greeting there are four paragraphs. The first introduces you, the writer of the email. The second says why you’re writing. The third contains any request for action or follow-up on the part of the recipient. The fourth thanks the recipient for their time and points to something in the future.

Following those four paragraphs is a farewell. “Sincerely” is a good neutral way to finish, and so are “Best” or “All the best.”

So the first step in our safe and worry-free way to communicate via email is to open an email communication with this template. Assuming the recipient responds, the second step is then to modify the tone or structure of future emails based on their reply. Are they more informal when writing back? Then feel free to be a little more informal. Do they maintain or even raise the level of formality? You can follow along. The beauty of this template is that it won’t be considered too laid-back for someone who prefers formality, but it won’t seem stilted to someone who’s more relaxed.

Generally speaking, in email communications, it is the recipient that sets the tone of the exchange. Most of the time it’s the recipient that is being asked to read, reply, or do something as a result of an email, and so it’s good to follow their lead. But be sure to maintain appropriate professional distance—if you don’t already have a relationship with someone, keeping your tone and format one step more formal than your recipient’s is a safe practice too.

Note also that all four of these paragraphs are short. In general, email is a bad medium for communicating large amounts of important information—not because the medium itself is ill-suited for it, but because people just aren’t used to having large amounts of important information arrive via email. Most people scan and filter emails quickly, looking for only the highest-priority items and skimming or ignoring everything else. Our email communications will be more successful when we remember how people interact with their inboxes: fast and without paying too much attention.

You’ll pretty much never go wrong by starting with this template, modifying it for your particular situation, and then following your recipient’s lead in your future communication.

When you have a spare moment, glance through your inbox and see what emails you’ve received lately. Which ones were most successful in getting you to read and respond, and why? Which were the easiest to understand? Which annoyed or angered you? Imitate the good practices, and avoid the bad ones.

Office Memos and Reports

The final documents we’ll cover are office memos, or “memoranda,” and reports. Our discussion will be short because the landscape for these business documents has changed so much in the past two decades. There are thousands of organizations that have never sent a memo and multiple generations of employees who have never received one, much less read one. For the most part, the memo, as well as its longer counterpart, the report, have been replaced by emails and email attachments.

Memos and reports, where they still exist, tend to be written in more formal, official language, since for many years they were considered to be the official form of communication within offices. Memos often have the word “MEMORANDUM” at the top, followed by the name of the recipient, the name of the sender, and the date. The current interface for email communication is a deliberate imitation of this common memo format.

One clear indication of the long-term destiny of the memo is the space allotted to it in business communication textbooks. Hartley and Bruckmann’s 2002 Business Communication devotes four pages to the memo and gives example structures. Hartley, Knapton, and Marriott’s 2023 Professional and Business Communication, on the other hand, gives one-third of a page.

If it’s your fate to need to write a memo or other official report, find out as much as you can from your organization about the format you should follow. Get a template if possible, and then use the other chapters in this book to make your communication engaging and interesting.