Enclosures and attachments

Always check that you have actually enclosed any documents that you have mentioned in your letter are enclosed, and that any documents you say in an email that you attach are indeed attached.

Check, too, that the documents you have enclosed or attached are the right documents. If, for example, the document you are supposed to be enclosing is invoice PNT/21, make sure you do not enclose invoice PNT/12. It is important to ensure that any documents enclosed or attached appear in the order in which you have listed them in your communication.

CONVENTIONS

Abbreviations

Abbreviations can be useful because they are quick to write and easy to read. But they are not worth using unless you are confident that the recipient of your letter will understand what they mean.

Differentiate between those abbreviations that are used internationally and those that are basically parochial. For example, the abbreviations gif (or cif, Cost, Insurance, and Freight) and fob (or fob, free on board) are incoterms which are used in international trade. However, you cannot be sure that abbreviations like p & p (postage and packing) and SAE (or sae, stamped addressed envelope) will be understood internationally. Similarly, purely national organizations are unlikely to be familiar to correspondents in other countries.

Note that international organizations such as UN, NATO, or EU have a different acronym in other languages and therefore are better spelled out when first mentioned.

Abbreviations which are used as grammatical shorthand, such as e.g. and i.e., are usually written in lower case letters with dots between the letters.

Statutes and people that are likely to be referred to a number of times within a letter or memo are often given abbreviations, e.g. Data Protection Act 1998 ('DPA').

In general, abbreviations that refer to an entity, such as UK, USA, NATO, should be capitalized without dots between the letters.

Numbers

When inserting numbers into legal letters and documents, the general rule is that numbers up to and including ten should be spelt and numbers 11 and above should be put in numerals. However, there are certain exceptions to this:

—If numbers recur through the text or are
being used for calculations, then numerals,
not words, should be used.

—If the number is approximate (e.g. around six
hundred years ago) it should be spelt out.

—Very large numbers should generally be
expressed without using rows of zeros
where possible, e.g. $3.5 million, not
£3,500,000.

—Percentages may be spelled out (twenty per
cent) or written as numbers (20 per cent or
20%).

—Numbers that begin sentences should be
spelled out.

In British and American usage, the decimal point in a number is represented by a dot (.). This differs from the continental European system, where a comma (,) is used to represent the decimal point. Therefore, a British or American writer would write one and three-tenths like this: 1.3, while a French speaker would write 1,3. In British and American usage, commas are not used to indicate a decimal point. Instead, the comma is used to break up long numbers. For example, 10,000,000 is ten million.

If there is the possibility of confusion, write the number in both figures and words, e.g. £100.05 (°^ne hundred pounds and five pence). This is standard practice in formal legal documents.

When referring to sums of money, the following rules apply:

—When writing numerical sums, the currency
sign goes before the sum without a space
between the sign and the figure, e.g. $100.

—When spelling out numbers, the name of the
currency is normally placed after the
number, e.g. one hundred pounds sterling.

Certain abbreviations for common currencies may also be used, including USD for US dollars and EUR for euros.

Statutes and cases

If you need to refer to statutes or cases in your letter, certain conventions must be followed:

—Statutes should be written without a comma
between the name of the statute and the
year it was enacted, e.g. the Treaty of
Amsterdam 1999.

—The word the should not form part of the
name of a statute. Therefore, one should
write the Single European Act 1986, not The
Single European Act 1986.

—When referring to a section of a statute write
section in full using a lower case s (unless
starting a sentence), e.g. section 2 or s.2 of the
Law of Property (Miscellaneous Provisions)
Act 19 89.

—When referring to a particular sub-section of
a statute do not use the word sub-section. For
example, instead of writing sub-section i in
the following, write section 722 (i) of the

Co mpa n ies Act 19 85.

— The names of cases should be written in
italics and the word versus should appear
as v., e.g. Donoghue v. Stevenson.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 791