Writing a letter is not as easy as it might seem—especially if you have to do it during a Common Entrance exam! In this post, I’d like to explain the traditional format of formal and casual letters and the decisions on wording that you’ll have to make.

(Note that letters can also be written in various other ways, including block format. This involves aligning everything to the left and skipping a line between each paragraph.)

First of all, here’s a quick list of the main parts of a letter that the examiner will be looking at:

• Sender’s address
• Date
• Greeting
• Text
• Sign-off
• Signature

Sender’s Address

It’s important to put the address of the sender (not the recipient!) at the top right of the letter (see above). The postman obviously doesn’t look inside the letter, so the address of the recipient needs to go on the envelope instead!

The only exception is if it’s a business letter intended to be posted in a window envelope. In that case, it needs to have the recipient’s address positioned above the sender’s address at just the right height so that it shows through the window when an A4 sheet is folded in three.

The address should really be aligned right, so you must remember to leave enough space for yourself when you start writing each line. Otherwise, it’ll look a bit of a mess…

Note that you no longer need any punctuation in the address, either after the flat or house number or after each line. 

Date

The date should be placed two or three lines below the sender’s address (again aligned right) in the traditional long format rather than just in numbers, eg 31 May 2023 rather than 31/5/23 (or 5/31/23 if you’re American!). Just make sure you don’t put the month first, which is the style in American English, eg October 7, 2018.

Note that you should write the date using cardinal numbers (1, 2, 3 etc) but read it using ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd etc), adding the words ‘the’ and ‘of’, eg what you write is 31 May 2023, but what you read is ‘the 31st of May 2023’.

Including the day of the week is optional, but if you do, you should put a comma after it, eg Monday, 7 October 2018.

Greeting (or Salutation)

Which greeting you use depends on the recipient. If you know the name of the person you’re writing to, then you should use ‘Dear’ rather than ‘To’, eg ‘Dear Mr and Mrs Dursley’. ‘To’ is fine for Christmas cards, but not for letters. You should also put a comma afterwards.

If you’re writing to a company or an organisation and you don’t know the name of the person, you have two options: you can either start the letter off with ‘Dear sir/madam’ or write ‘To whom it may concern’. This works better when it’s a reference for a job or a formal letter that may be circulated among several people.

Body

The body of the letter can obviously be whatever you like, but just make sure you start it underneath the comma after the greeting. You should also use paragraphs if the letter is more than a few lines.

The traditional way to start each paragraph is to ‘indent’ or push in the first word by a centimetre or so, and the traditional way to end each paragraph is to move to the next line—without skipping a line.

Sign-off (or Closing or Complimentary Close)

The sign-off is just the phrase you put at the end of the letter before your signature. If the letter is to a friend or relative, there aren’t any rules. You can say anything from ‘Love’ to ‘Best regards’ or ‘Yours ever’.

Note that they all start with a capital letter (though only for the first word) and should be followed by a comma. If it’s a business letter, the sign-off depends on the greeting: if you’ve used someone’s name, you should use ‘Yours sincerely’, but if you haven’t, it’s ‘Yours faithfully’.

Signature

The signature is very important in letter-writing as it’s a simple way of ‘proving’ who you are, so you should develop one that you’re happy with. It should include your first name or your initial(s) and your surname, eg Nick Dale, N Dale or NW Dale.

Your signature should be special, so it doesn’t need to be ‘neat’ or ‘clear’ like the rest of the letter. In fact, the prettier and the more stylish, the better!

And there you have it. This is only one way of writing a letter, and there are other ways of formatting the information, but these rules will at least give you the best chance of getting full marks in your Common Entrance exam!