Need to write business letter with punch? Use Office Letters 2000

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Life is full of amusing stories. Just because I speak and write a little English, friends and relatives often come to me and ask me to translate -- even compose -- business letters for them. Now, despite so many articles and books that I have read on the importance of the ability to say "No", I still find it difficult to decline their requests. My biggest problem is that I have no experience working in a business environment. The language of business, as we all know, differs in many respects from the language used in mass publication.

What I usually did in the past was to resort to a small collection of books containing model letters that I kept on the shelves behind my desk. However, most of these books were bought more than two decades ago when I was still a student. As you can imagine, the style was quite out of date.

Fortunately, a couple of months ago I came across Office Letters 2000 from Streetwise Software (www.swsoftware.com). It has been very useful. In fact, it is another godsend that makes this occasional profession in business correspondence much easier.

The US$29.95 program, which comes in a CD-ROM, is based on five printed books: Lifetime Encyclopedia of Letters, Essential Words Everyone Should Know, Power Sales Letters, Power Memos and E-mails and The Everyday Guide to Better Writing. The first book was a best-seller by Harold E. Meyer, published by Prentice Hall. Currently, Streetwise will also give you Office Graphics 2000 for free if you buy this program, and that will cover the shipping cost all the way from the U.S.

Once installed, the Office Letters 2000 menu will appear under Word's File, so we don't have to go out of Word to launch the program. It works with Microsoft Office 95, 97 and 2000, as well as WordPerfect Office. Once the program is installed, the CD-ROM is no longer needed.

Useful

How often do we encounter a letter -- or even an article -- with heaps of information that we cannot make sense of? Read the following sample paragraph, which I've taken from the program: "We have shortages of high-roof box cars in the Northwest. In addition, the South Bend mill has been short of box cars throughout the week. We expect to clear up the South Bend shortage by Saturday, and we are using standard box cars in lieu of high-roof cars to avoid delays in customer shipments from the Northwest."

Meyer helps me understand why such a paragraph is difficult to follow. As he explains, a writer may present his points in the sequence of "Problem A, Problem B, Solution B, Solution A". As a result, he says, the reader suffers from an awkward twist in his thinking as he has to jump backward three steps to relate Solution A to Problem A.

I can't say I have never made the same mistakes in the past, but at least now I'm aware of such a potential problem in writing and I will consciously check my own writing against it. It also makes me aware that writing business letters and writing articles have the same basic requirements. Incidentally, understanding this problem was the first benefit I received from using this CD- ROM.

The program interface is a mix of Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer (IE). As you can see in the accompanying picture, the left pane contains the directory of all its folders and the right pane has the contents of the selected folder. Just like in Windows Explorer, we have to click on a top-level folder to get to all the subfolders beneath it.

The entire program is organized along the five books, each with a different structure. The first book, Lifetime Encyclopedia of Letters, is divided into 19 folders, covering topics from "Requesting a Favor" to "Making Complaints" to "Thank you and appreciation." Each of these topics is divided into four parts: Intro (the introduction), How to do it (important points to keep in mind), Model phrases (expressions that can be used in the opening or closing part) and Letters (a collection of model letters). The Problem A-Solution B problem is highlighted in the Intro section of Providing Information.

A click on the Letters folder will give a list of all model letters for a particular purpose. Meyer was not bluffing when he chose the word "encyclopedia" for his impressive compilation of 850 model letters. There is a model letter for almost any issue that you can think of, from shipping instructions to payment instructions to informing customers of a union strike in your factory.

Language aid

The word "abrogate" may be a familiar word to an English speaker, but I learned its meaning in the Essential Words Everyone Should Know folder. The selected vocabulary is divided alphabetically into 20 groups. Each item contains an explanation on the meaning of the word, an example of its use and a list of other words with similar meanings.

The Everyday Guide to Better Writing also provides great help. Among other things, it offers tips on avoiding gender bias. For example, the book recommends the sentence "Senior executives, and their spouses, will attend the function", in place of a sentence such as "Senior executives, and their wives, will attend the function".

The program has a facility for full text searching. And, if you still crave for more fonts, it also comes with 500 classic fonts.

Isn't there anything at all that could be desired? There is. Some of the books that Office Letters 2000 is based on already need revising. Great as it is, Lifetime Encyclopedia of Letters, for instance, was published in 1992. The use of English has evolved a lot since then -- especially in the areas of information technology and e-business. We would appreciate it even more if it provided model letters for today's business environment, where IT terms are extensively used. The book Power Memos and E-mail suggests four instances where e-mail is appropriate. In reality, we are increasingly shifting to e-mail as the only mode of communications -- business or otherwise.

Apart from these small wishes, I've found Office Letters 2000 a great help. The name is quite misleading, though. It is not just an aid for writing letters, it is a very useful aid in communicating. If you run a small office/home office, this program should be on your PC.