Advanced Business Correspondence
A 1921 university textbook by George Burton Hotchkiss, head of advertising and marketing at New York University, and Edward Jones Kilduff, NYU professor of business English, published by Harper & Brothers.
What it is
A 1921 university textbook by George Burton Hotchkiss, head of advertising and marketing at New York University, and Edward Jones Kilduff, NYU professor of business English, published by Harper & Brothers. Its premise, set out in Chapter I, is that every business letter is a selling letter, written for impression rather than expression and judged by the response it earns. Eighteen chapters cover credit, collection, complaint and adjustment, job application, sales, promotion, follow-up systems, inquiries, argumentative letters, correspondence supervision, form paragraphs and reports, with appendices on letter layout and law. It teaches through letters taken from the files of firms such as Goodyear, Guaranty Trust and the National City Bank of New York. Collection appeals are graded from sympathy to fear, follow-ups are sorted into wear-out, continuous and campaign systems, and replies that interrupt a series, called 'splits', are pulled out for personal answers.
Why read it now
The core idea holds: every message a company sends, a credit refusal, a reminder, a complaint reply, either builds or spends goodwill, so each should be written for the reader's response. Customer experience research agrees that a complaint handled well can raise loyalty, which the book says plainly when it calls a complaint an opportunity. Its collection logic, that the best collector brings in the most money with the least loss of trade and that letters should climb gradually, matches current practice in payment reminders and churn recovery. The follow-up chapters anticipate email automation: a wear-out series stops when returns no longer cover the cost, and a prospect who replies leaves the sequence for a personal answer. What has dated: the fixed four-step sales formula, the chapter on appeals to women, the typing conventions, and claims that rest on the authors' teaching experience rather than controlled tests. Use: lay out your payment reminders or renewal messages against the sympathy, justice, self-interest, fear ladder and check that none starts at the top.
Passages worth keeping
The purpose of writing for impression rather than expression is the most essential distinction between business English and literature.
الكتابة التجارية تهدف إلى التأثير في القارئ ودفعه إلى فعل، لا إلى أن يعبّر الكاتب عن نفسه كما في الأدب.
Similarly is it true that the best collection man is not he who merely has the greatest percentage of collections, but he who secures the maximum of collections with a resulting minimum loss of trade.
نجاح التحصيل لا يقاس بالمال المسترد وحده، بل بقدرته على استرداد المال مع الإبقاء على العميل.
The appeals that are most commonly used in collection work, arranged in the order of their strength and insistency, are as follows: (1) sympathy, (2) justice, (3) self-interest, (4) fear.
تتدرج رسائل التحصيل من الأخف إلى الأشد: طلب التفهم، ثم الاحتكام إلى العدل، ثم مصلحة المدين، ثم التحذير من العواقب.
Nowadays a progressive business house considers a complaint an opportunity.
الشركة المتقدمة لا تدفن الشكوى، بل تراها فرصة لكسب ثقة العميل من جديد.
Good sales letters are rare; good follow-up systems are even rarer.
كتابة رسالة بيع جيدة صعبة، وتخطيط سلسلة متابعة جيدة أصعب منها.
The scanned text has OCR errors. The passages are quoted from it, with only obvious slips fixed.
What it teaches best
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