Includes index.

Chapter 1. Setting off Ideas -- Chapter 2. Asking Letters -- Chapter 3. Telling Letters -- Chapter 4. Building Good Will -- Chapter 5. Simplifying Letter Language -- Chapter 6. Trimming the Hedge -- Chapter 7. Attending to Details -- Chapter 8. Attending to form -- Chapter 9. Writing your Resume.

Sooner or later, everyone has some reason to write a business letter. And almost everyone finds this difficult to do--even people who are normally comfortable with other kinds of writing assignments. There are two good reasons why the business letter is a challenge. First, a business letter can have greater consequences than any other kind of writing. It can win a job or lose it. It can make a sale or sink it. It can clarify a puzzling point or obscure it further--and so on, over the range of effects from the most positive to the most negative. As everyone knows, a business letter must be right, and this obligation can be frightening.