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Be clear and brief in your internal business correspondence.
Dr. Richard Nordquist is professor emeritus of rhetoric and English at Georgia Southern University and the author of several university-level grammar and composition textbooks.
Updated on February 05, 2020A memorandum, more commonly known as a memo, is a short message or record used for internal communication in a business. Once the primary form of internal written communication, memorandums have declined in use since the introduction of email and other forms of electronic messaging; however, being able to write clear memos certainly can serve you well in writing internal business emails, as they often serve the same purpose.
Memos can be used to quickly communicate with a wide audience something brief but important, such as procedural changes, price increases, policy additions, meeting schedules, reminders for teams, or summaries of agreement terms, for example.
Communications strategist Barbara Diggs-Brown says that an effective memo is "short, concise, highly organized, and never late. It should anticipate and answer all questions that a reader might have. It never provides unnecessary or confusing information."
Be clear, be focused, be brief yet complete. Take a professional tone and write as if the world could read it—that is, don't include any information that's too sensitive for everyone to see, especially in this age of copy and paste or "click and forward."
Start with the basics: to whom the article is addressed, the date, and the subject line. Start the body of the memo with a clear purpose, state what you need the readers to know, and conclude with what you need readers to do, if necessary. Remember that employees may just skim the memo upon receipt, so use short paragraphs, subheads, and where you can, use lists. These are "points of entry" for the eye so the reader can refer back easily to the part of the memo that he or she needs.
Don't forget to proofread. Reading aloud can help you find dropped words, repetition, and awkward sentences.
Here is a sample internal memo from a fictional publishing company informing employees about upcoming schedule changes due to a Thanksgiving holiday. Production could also have sent separate memos to separate departments as well, especially if there were more detail that each department needed and that wouldn't pertain to the other departments.
To: All employees
From: E.J. Smith, Production Lead
Date: November 1, 2018
Subject: Thanksgiving Print Schedule Change
Production would like to remind everyone that the Thanksgiving holiday will affect our print deadlines this month. Any hard-copy pages that would normally go out to the printer via UPS on a Thursday or Friday during the week will need to go out by 3 p.m. on Wednesday, November 21.
Ad Sales and Editorial Departments
Photography and Graphics Departments
Thank you in advance, everyone, for your help in getting materials in as early as possible and your consideration for the production department staff.
The following is a fictional memo to set up a meeting with members of a team who are returning from a trade show.
To: Trade Show Team
From: C.C. Jones, Marketing Supervisor
Date: July 10, 2018
Subject: Trade Show Return Meeting
Upon your return to work Friday, July 20, from the trade show, let's plan a noon lunch meeting in the east wing meeting room to go over how the show went. Let's plan to discuss what worked well and what didn't, such as:
I know that when you get back from a trade show you have a million things to follow up on, so we will keep the meeting to 90 minutes or less. Please come prepared with your feedback and constructive criticism on the marketing aspects of the show. Existing-customer feedback and new customer leads will be covered in a separate meeting with product and sales teams. Thank you for your work at the show.
Diggs-Brown, Barbara. The PR Styleguide. 3rd ed, Cengage Learning, 2012.
Cite this Article Your CitationNordquist, Richard. "What Is a Memorandum? Definition and Examples." ThoughtCo, Apr. 5, 2023, thoughtco.com/memorandum-memo-term-1691377. Nordquist, Richard. (2023, April 5). What Is a Memorandum? Definition and Examples. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtco.com/memorandum-memo-term-1691377 Nordquist, Richard. "What Is a Memorandum? Definition and Examples." ThoughtCo. https://www.thoughtco.com/memorandum-memo-term-1691377 (accessed September 13, 2024).
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