Page 87 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

76 TODAY’S BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Figure 6.3 Revised executive summary

Now let’s consider a second example. In Figure 6.4, you will see a
portion of a memorandum that was written by one of our students. The
assignment called for students to interview a professional who was work-
ing in the student’s desired career field. The students were asked to find out
about the role of communication in the interview subject’s job. Lessons
about communication were to be extracted from the interview data and
reported in a brief memorandum. The memorandum in Figure 6.4 can be
improved significantly with only a handful of formatting changes. Here
are some of the formatting problems:

1. The routing information is not formatted appropriately. The date is
floating on the right margin all by itself.
2. The subject line is not indicative of the memo’s content. The reader
should be able to look at the subject line and have a good idea of the
message’s purpose and content.