Letters are external documents. They originate in the office and are sent to patients, associates, and other outside recipients.
Letterhead is the paper that the physician will use for official correspondence. It will have the office name on the top (or the doctor’s name), the address, and phone number of the office. You will use the letterhead paper in all your correspondence whether to another physician, patient, or vendor. Letterhead or stationery is a higher quality paper than plain paper.
There are four main elements to every letter. These are:
The heading is generally something standard to office stationary, or letterhead. Since you don’t have to create this yourself, the only other element you must be sure to include in the heading is the date. To avoid confusion, the month should be spelled out first, followed by the date, and then the year should be included in its entirety (e.g., April 5, 2017, as opposed to 4/5/17).
The opening is the next element of a letter. The opening starts with the recipient’s name and full address. Even though this is not used for delivering the letter, the name and address should be accurate and complete. Title, name, street number, street address, city, state, and ZIP code are all required.
Below the address, the opening of some letters contain an attention line (“ATTN:” or “ATTENTION:”) to direct the letter to a specific person. If this is not required for your letter, you should begin with the greeting. The greeting can be a person’s title and name followed by a colon for business letters or a comma for more personal letters (e.g., “Mr. Lennon:” or “Mr. Lennon,”). If the specific recipient is unknown, the greeting should read: “To Whom It May Concern:”.
As expected, the body of the letter contains the main contents of the letter. The body is followed by the closing. The closing begins with something such as “Yours” or “Best regards” or other such compliments. This is followed by the author’s signature under which the author’s typed name appears. Next comes the reference notation, which includes the author’s initials in capital letters followed by the lower case initials of the person who actually put the letter on paper. It looks like this: SG:ab or SG/ab. This line is only required if the author of the letter is not the one who types it.
If copies of the letter are sent to others or if there are enclosures to a letter, two additional lines are needed. Enclosures are noted with one of the following: “Enc:” or “Enclosure:” or “Enclosures:”.
If copies of the letter are sent to others, a copy notation is used. This is indicated by adding “cc:” along with the name of the recipient of this carbon copy. If there are multiple recipients, the recipients’ names should be alphabetized. Blind carbon copies (“bcc:”) might also be sent. They are indicated in the same way as carbon copies, but do not appear on the original letter.
The final element of the closing is the ever-popular postscript (“P.S.”) This is for any additional information the author wants to include that has not yet been found in the letter. Typically, formal letters do not contain a postscript.
One important aspect of each element of a letter that has not yet been discussed is placement on the page. Following is a list of each element of a letter and where each of the aforementioned elements belongs on a document.
Generally, letters should have 1-inch margins. If letters are particularly short (fewer than 100 words) or slightly longer (100 to 200 words in length), then 2-inch or 1.5-inch margins, respectively, should be used.
There are 5 main business letter formats: full block, modified block, semi-block, hanging indentation, and simplified. Following are the main characteristics of each. (Please note, since letterhead is specific to each company or organization, its location is not accounted for in these formats.)
Unlike letters, memos, as they are commonly known, are internal documents. They generally have 4 headings:
For each of these headings, the relevant content should appear on the same line. For example:
TO: Joseph Angelo
The body of the memo should appear three line spaces after the subject line. Like letters, memos may have reference or copy notation. The same rules that applied to letters regarding these elements apply to memos. More often than not, specific medical offices will have a template that should be used for all memos.
If your office submits manuscripts for publication, chances are the publisher will provide specific information about the style and format required of all submissions. Some general elements you should be sure that each manuscript includes are:
Remember, it is most important that you follow the submission guidelines provided by the publisher. These guidelines take precedence over the general information found here.