Chapter 8: Routine Messages
Learning Objectives
1. Write routine message types such as goodwill messages
2. Plan, write, revise, and edit short documents and messages that are organized, complete, and tailored to specific audiences.
a. Format and write short documents such as routine correspondence.
Share the love! Rather than an optional cherry on top, goodwill messages are as essential to healthy professional relationships as they are in personal ones. Thank-you, congratulatory, and sympathy notes add an important, feel-good human touch in a world that continues to embrace technology that isolates people while being marketed as a means of connecting them. The goodwill that such messages promote makes both sender and receiver feel better about each other and themselves compared with where they’d be if the messages weren’t sent at all. In putting smiles on faces, such notes are effective especially because many people don’t send them—either because they feel that they’re too difficult to write or because it doesn’t even occur to them to do so. Since praise for some can be harder to think of and write than criticism, a brief guide on how to do it right may be of help here.
Goodwill Messages and Recommendations Topics
- 8.5.1: The 5 S’s of Goodwill Messages
- 8.5.2: Thank-you Notes
- 8.5.3: Congratulatory Messages
- 8.5.4: Expressions of Sympathy
- 8.5.5: Replying to Goodwill Messages
- 8.5.6: Recommendation Messages and Reference Letters
8.5.1: The 5 S’s of Goodwill Messages
Whether you’re writing thank-you notes, congratulatory messages, or expressions of sympathy, follow the “5 S” principles of effective goodwill messages:
- Specific: Crafting the message around specific references to the situation that it addresses will steer such messages away from the impression that they were boilerplate template statements that you plagiarized.
- Sincere: A goodwill message will come off as genuine if it’s near to what you would say to the recipient in person. Avoid cliché Hallmark-card expressions and excessive formality such as It is with a heavy heart that I extend my heartfelt condolences to you in these sad times.
- Selfless: Refer only to the person or people involved rather than yourself. The spotlight is on them, not you. Avoid telling stories about how you experienced something similar in an attempt to show how you relate.
- Short: Full three-part messages and three-part paragraphs are unnecessary in thank-you notes, congratulatory messages, or expressions of sympathy, but appropriate in recommendations that require detail. Don’t make the short length of the message deter you from setting aside time to draft it.
- Spontaneous: Move quickly to write your message so that it follows closely on the news that prompted it.
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8.5.2: Thank-you Notes
In the world of business, not all transactions involve money. People do favours for each other, and acknowledging those with thank-you notes is ess