Hello and welcome to our lecture on writing business memos. By the end of this video, you should be able to write basic business memos and understand how they should be formatted. Let's begin by briefly talking about the basic purpose of memos. Generally, memos are used for internal purposes within a company. They can be used to request information, respond to requests, notify employees or employers about something, or to report on certain events. Basically, I want to go through some quick guidelines on writing memos. A memo is generally a hard-copy or a paper document. They usually are used for intra-organization communication. They should be clear and concise. And memos include To, From, Date and Subject headings, much like an email. They may contain headings in the body of the message. And they should include the sender's full name and title to be formal. Memos can take on a one-to-many format. Or they can take on a one-to-one format. Here's an example of a general format of an email. Notice how it is similar to the format we showed you in the emailing lectures. The main difference however is that the language and memos will be less conversational, unlike emails. Memos generally follow a formal business writing style. Now, the other lectures in this lesson will go in more detail about the style of language in memos. For now, I just want to note that you should consider the kiss rule when writing memos. That is keep it simple, stupid. Or to be more polite, keep it simple and short. When writing memos, you should use short words or shorter sentences when possible. Although sentence variety is still important. You need to make your purpose clear, so don't elaborate too much. You should have one subject in one memo. If you find that you're writing about another subject then that should go in another memo. And you should write using plain English. Again, take a look at our other lectures, particularly the one on plain English, to learn more about that subject. So, now you should have a basic idea of how to write a business memo and how to format a business memo. Remember to watch other videos on the subject in this lesson to learn more details about the language and style commonly used in business memos. Thank you very much for watching.