[Music]
Okay, so let's move on to the next part which is attention line. Attention line
helps a letter get to who it needs to get to. Now in your email, usually, you just
have a to. In a letter, you can add an attention line, but you can also do this
inside of your email, where you're actually saying that I'm sending this
letter to, but I wanted to go extra to a specific person. So let me just give you
a quick example. It's a little bit hard to understand, right? So let's say I have
a inquiry or sales letter. I want to try to get the attention of someone inside
of a company. So I can send this letter to the marketing department, let's say.
But inside the marketing department, there is a person named ms.
Smith. So Miss Smith is the person I want this to get to. But I'm going to send it
to the marketing department. So what happens this letter will go to the
marketing department but it will be attention Miss Smith. Now what does that
mean in reality? It's a very good thing to understand. It's that this letter goes
to the marketing department. Anyone there can open it and begin to work on it and
then they will pass it on to Miss Smith. But if you wrote your letter to Miss
Smith, and what if ms. Smith is busy? No one can open that except her. What if
ms. Smith has left the company or maybe she has taken a vacation? Now your letter
must wait for her to come back, maybe two weeks, or three week. That's not a good way to
do business. So a much better approach is we send the letter to something bigger,
like the whole company or a department, and then we say to a person. But if that
person is not there, that person is busy or something has happened,
then someone else inside that "to" can open and address the letter, take care of the
letter. so let me go over this one more time.
Let's say that we're sending this to the marketing department and attention miss
Smith. So who can open it? Anyone here. What if Miss Smith is not in the company
anymore, orr what if Miss Smith is on vacation? No problem, anyone inside the
marketing department can open it. What if Miss Smith is there. She's okay and She's
not busy today? They will pass it on to her right away, and she will respond to
it. So you can see the way we write the attention line is like this. But you can
see up here is who is this letter to. So in this case, it's a great example. it's going
to this whole company. Someone in the company needs to open this letter. Who?
Anyone. I don't really care who, but I do know that I want the letter to go to
Greg Rogers eventually. I want it to get to him. If he's not there, someone else
please take care of this letter. Let's take another example here. This is a
somewhat different example, a little bit more general. So here this is to and
then we have the address so this is the address of the receiver, and then down
here we have the attention line. So in the to it's the whole company. This
whole company I'm sending it to. Sounds strange, but you can do that.
Here I'm sending it to a department. I'm not sending it to a person. I'm sending
it just to a department. What does that mean? That means that if I send it to the
wrong Department, or maybe that I got the name wrong, or
maybe this department was closed last week, that's okay,because anyone else in
the company can now open my letter. Or someone in the company will open the
letter and what will they do? They will send it over to the marketing department
right away. So that's a great example of how to write a really good business
address. You send it to a bigger level, and address to a smaller level,
usually a person. So let's take a look netx at what happens in the opening. We have
the salutation. So the salutation is what you've seen many times before, something
like dear somebody. So the important thing to remember is... We're going to talk
about it a little bit. It's this colon here. So this is a colon, right? A colon are two
dots. But an English colon is different from a Chinese colon. You need to be very careful.
This colon has no space before it and one space after it. So you can see here
no space before the colon one space after the colon, dear sir,
gentlemen. Now maybe you've seen often people use a comma here. So they say dear
mr. Smith and then leave the comma. That's a different way to write that.
We're going to stick with the colon, and I'm going to show you why in a moment. So
here are people you know like dear Miss Roberts. Right? I know this person's name.
Mrs., Miss. and Ms. Of course, you probably learn this in junior high school or
high school that these mean different things in English, right? One means
married. One means single. One means we don't know, we don't care. These days, we
try to just stick with the MS because it's not important whether a person is
married or not, right? So just use MS. if you don't know any more information.
That's the best way. Of course, if they prefer to use Mrs. Like when somebody
sends you a letter, if they sign the letter and they say Mrs. Smith, M-r-s., then
when you write a letter back, an email back, you should always say Mrs. Smith.
Don't do something different. It might make them a little bit offended. Of
course sometimes, you don't know the person, and that would be something like
this, "Dear madam" or "Dear ladies", a group of ladies. "Dear madam, Madameses".
"Madammes", yes, "Madammmes, Madammes". So you can become more informal or less formal. But
it really is important to have this. Lots of people write their emails and they
don't include this salutation at all. I often receive emails and they don't have
my name's there at all. How do I even know that you know who I am, right? And
you may think well today email were very informal. Well, the reason for doing this
is not to be formal, the reason we're doing this is to know that I'm not
getting junk mail, that you're not wasting my time, that you know who I am.
And it's always going to pay off for you to be formal in business. You're never
going to lose something by being formal. So we have many different ways we can do
this. If it's addressed to one person or two people, or it can be addressed to an
organisation like here "gentlemen, ladies and gentlemen". And sometimes you don't
know who it's to. In that case, we can say to whom it may concern. You're like "I have no
idea who's going to get this." I don't know who they are but I can say, "To
whom it may concern." So these are great ways and your QPR program has many examples to help you.
[Music] [Applause]
[Music]