9.3 Positive and Neutral Messages
You will find yourself writing many emails and letters in your career. Most will be positive or neutral in approach. Positive messages convey good news or work to establish good will, such as when announcing a new hire or confirming an agreement. Neutral messages are highly routine messages that carry little if any emotional content, such as when conveying updates to directives or procedures for processing manual account updates. These messages drive the day-to-day work of organizations, enabling new relationships to form, reinforcing existing ones, exchanging ideas and information, and responding to need and opportunity. Examples of these such messages include the following:
Positive messages examples: claim acceptances and adjustments, invitations, invitation confirmations, appreciation messages, good news announcements, recommendation letters
Neutral message examples: routine requests, directives or instructions (see the chapter on Instructions), policy or procedure updates, arrangement confirmations or follow ups, claims, general informational messages
Using the Direct Approach to Organize Ideas
How you organize information in your messages will be determined by the context and the receiver. As such, it is important to complete a thorough audience and context analysis so that you can adapt the content to achieve your communication goal. When you expect the reader to respond to your message with a positive or neutral attitude, you can organize your message using the direct approach.
The direct approach is created by placing the key idea in the opening paragraph, thus revealing to the reader almost immediately the purpose of the communication. As such, the message would be structured in the following way:
Positive and Neutral Message Structure
| OPENING
subject and key idea |
| BACKGROUND
general circumstances or context |
| DETAILS
explanation |
| CLOSE
courteous close (with action statement if necessary) |
Keep in mind that when the background information is so brief as it does not warrant a separate paragraph, you may include the background information in the opening paragraph.
This chapter will discuss a few positive and neutral message types that are frequently put to use in business contexts, highlighting key idea placement and message structure, along with a variety of formats: email, memo, and letter.
Sample Neutral Messages
Claims and Complaints
As the video, Bad Customer Service Montage (n.d.) suggests, business doesn’t always go smoothly. In all such cases, customers or clients are likely to make your company aware of what went wrong and what they want to be done about it. A claim explains what went wrong and requests compensation from the offending party; whereas, a complaint explains what went wrong and merely requests correction or apology. For example, if you placed an order for MS Office software and received Norton Antivirus software instead, you would have reason to make a claim for full reimb