Hints for Addressing Business Letters

Writing business letters correctly can often be a ticklish issue, what with more and more women moving into business and professions. Some tips on how to tackle this situation

How do you address a business letter to someone whose marital status as a woman you don't know? Or, worse still, you aren't even sure whether the person being addressed to is a man or woman. Nowadays, there are quite a few names where gender isn't easy to decipher, such as Roop Gupta or Lakshmi Narayan or Madhu Misra.

Certainly many of us have at time been confronted by a letter sent by someone whose sex we had to guess - and guessed wrongly. The matter is not helped because many women in the business and official world make it a point not to disclose their gender in correspondence,which is understandable. With more and more women moving into business and professions, addressing of business letters correctly can be ticklish.

One suggestion to use the full forename-surname salutation without mentioning Mr or Mrs or Ms could begin with `Dear Roop Gupta'. Of course, the forename-surname salutation is reserved for correspondence at more intimate levels than with perfect strangers. But, this seems a sensible way out. The Katherine Gibbs Handbook of Business English permits it. `If it's not possible to determine the gender of the addressee, omit a courtesy title in the inside address and in the salutation.''

What about the situation where you know that the person to be addressed is a female but you aren't sure about her marital status? Faced with the difficulty between the use of Miss' and `Mrs' back in the 1960s, the feminists took up the word `Ms' pronounced as Miz (plural Mses). Unlike Mr and Mrs which are abbreviations, Mr has no spelled-out form.