Question

Approaches to the Letter of Transmittal and Executive Summary

What are ways in which you can use your reader’s perspective to shape your letter of transmittal and executive summary? What kind of language works best? Why is this vital to the success of your report?

Answer 1

Reader's perspective can play a very crucial role in deciding and also givung the right context and shape to transmittal letter and also the executive summary. Knowing what exactly your reader must be interested in reading, you have to design the document as per their interest level as well.

A transmittal letter is a letter which doesn't really work using the formal language. An informal language is used on the basis of "I" giving the idea about what is being sent and the purpose of sending it. It is to simply prpvide the information for the accompanying document in a brief manner. Knowing the perspective of the reader reading it, you have to keep the same letter short, brief and informative. For example, if the document is about the finance reports and the finance manager is to read the same, you have to keep the letter short but informative where the important financial aspects are mentioned in the transmittal letter so that the reader knows the upcoming document is about this particular financial information. This is an important part for the success of the report because this would give the reader the exact idea what the upcoming report is made up of so that he could have clear definite mind about reading the same and could make a decision accordingly.

The executive summary is also an abbreviated form of the report. The difference is that unlike transmittal report, this is more formalised because the executives are going to read it. The perspective you have to keep before making an executive summary is that Executives often do not have time to read the whole report. Thus, this summary should be both informative and also less time consuming where the most important elements that were covered in the report and also the ending and result should be mentioned in this summary. The language should be formalised and also organised the way the report is. If the report uses a direct structure, the summary would also accompany the same. For example, if you know the directors are keen to know what happened in the report but doesn't have the time to read the same, include the synopses of all the major sections of your report into this summary. This would give the directors a good idea about what major things were discussed in the report and their time save would be saved as well.