Written Communication - Meaning, Advantages and Disadvantages Written communication has great significance in todays business world.

It is an innovative activity of the mind. Effective written communication is essential for preparing worthy promotional materials for business development. Speech came before writing. But writing is more unique and formal than speech. Effective writing involves careful choice of words, their organization in correct order in sentences formation as well as cohesive composition of sentences. Also, writing is more valid and reliable than speech. But while speech is spontaneous, writing causes delay and takes time as feedback is not immediate. Advantages of Written Communication Written communication helps in laying down apparent principles, policies and rules for running of an organization.

It is a permanent means of communication. Thus, it is useful where record maintenance is required. It assists in proper delegation of responsibilities. While in case of oral communication, it is impossible to fix and delegate responsibilities on the grounds of speech as it can be taken back by the speaker or he may refuse to acknowledge. Written communication is more precise and explicit. Effective written communication develops and enhances an organizations image. It provides ready records and references. Legal defenses can depend upon written communication as it provides valid records. Disadvantages of Written Communication Written communication does not save upon the costs. It costs huge in terms of stationery and the manpower employed in writing/typing and delivering letters.

Also, if the receivers of the written message are separated by distance and if they need to clear their doubts, the response is not spontaneous.

Written communication is time-consuming as the feedback is not immediate. The encoding and sending of message takes time.

Effective written communication requires great skills and competencies in language and vocabulary use. Poor writing skills and quality have a negative impact on organizations reputation.

Too much paper work and e-mails burden is involved. Journal writing: Journal A journal (through French from Latin diurnalis, daily) has several related meanings:

a daily record of events or business; a private journal is usually referred to as a diary a newspaper or other periodical, in the literal sense of one published each day many publications issued at stated intervals, such as magazines, or scholarly journals, academic journals, or the record of the transactions of a society, are often called journals.[1] Although journal is sometimes used as a synonym for "magazine", in academic use, a journal refers to a serious, scholarly publication that is peer-reviewed. A non-scholarly magazine written for an educated audience about an industry or an area of professional activity is usually called a professional magazine.[citation needed]

The word "journalist", for one whose business is writing for the public press and nowadays also other media, has been in use since the end of the 17th century. Public Journal: A public journal is a record of day-by-day events in a parliament or congress. It is also called minutes or records. Business and accounting The term "journal" is also used in business:

A journal is a book or computer file in which monetary transactions are entered the first time they are processed. This journal lists transactions in chronological sequence by date prior to a transfer of the same transactions to a ledger in the process of bookkeeping Narrations or equivalent to a ship's log, as a record of the daily run, such as observations,

weather changes, or other events of daily importance Journal writing : Diary A diary is a record (originally in handwritten format) with discrete entries arranged by date reporting on what has happened over the course of a day or other period. A personal diary may include a person's experiences, and/or thoughts or feelings, including comment on current events outside the writer's direct experience. Someone who keeps a diary is known as a diarist. Diaries undertaken for institutional purposes play a role in many aspects of human civilization, including government records (e.g., Hansard), business ledgers and military records. In British English the word may also denote a preprinted journal format. Generally the term is today employed for personal diaries, normally intended to remain private or to have a limited circulation amongst friends or relatives. The word "journal" may be sometimes used for "diary," but generally a diary has (or intends to have) daily entries, whereas journalwriting can be less frequent. Although a diary may provide information for a memoir, autobiography or biography, it is generally written not with the intention of being published as it stands, but for the author's own use. In recent years, however, there is internal evidence in some diaries (e.g., those of Ned Rorem, Alan Clark, Tony Benn or Simon Gray) that they are written with eventual publication in mind, with the intention of self-vindication (pre- or posthumous) or simply for profit. By extension the term diary is also used to mean a printed publication of a written diary; and may also refer to other terms of journal including electronic formats (e.g., blogs). Internet diaries As internet access became commonly available, many people adopted it as another medium in which to chronicle their lives with the added dimension of an audience. The first online diary is thought to be Claudio Pinhanez's "Open Diary," published at the MIT Media Lab website from 14 November 1994 until 1996. Other early online diarists include Justin Hall, who began eleven years of personal online diary-writing in 1994, Carolyn Burke, who started publishing "Carolyn's Diary" on 3 January 1995, and Bryon Sutherland, who announced his diary The Semi-Existence of Bryon in a USENET newsgroup on 19 April 1995. Web-based services such as Open Diary (started in October, 1998) and LiveJournal (January, 1999) soon appeared to streamline and automate online publishing, but growth in personal storytelling came with the emergence of blogs. While the format first focused on external links and topical commentary, widespread blogging tools were quickly used to create web journals. Recent advances have also been made to enable the privacy of internet diary entries. For example, some diary software now stores entries in encrypted format, such 256-bit AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption, and others only permit access to the diary after correct PIN

entry on a secure USB device. Other forms of diary Travel journals A travel journal, travel diary, or road journal, is the documentation of a journey or series of journeys. Diet journal A diet journal or food diary is a daily record of all food and beverage consumed, usually for the purpose of the tracking calorie consumption for the purpose of weight loss or other nutritional monitoring. Sleep diaries A sleep diary or sleep log is a tool used in the diagnosis and treatment of sleep disorders. Tagebuch The German Tagebuch is normally rendered as diary in English, but the term includes workbooks or working journals as well as diaries proper. For example, the notebooks of the Austrian writerRobert Musil and of the German-Swiss artist Paul Klee are called Tagebcher. Unusual diaries Some officer cadets at the Royal Military College of Canada wrote their diaries in India ink on their T-squares; examples of these from the 1880s are retained in the College's museum. War diary A war diary is a regularly updated official record of a military unit's administration and activities during wartime maintained by an officer in the unit. Dream diary A Dream journal (or dream diary) is a journal in which dream experiences are recorded. Email Electronic mail, most commonly referred to as email or e-mail since approximately 1993,[2] is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the same time, in common with instant messaging. Today's email systems are based on a store-and-forward model. Email servers accept, forward, deliver, and store messages. Neither the users nor their computers are required to be online simultaneously; they need connect only briefly, typically to an email server, for as long as it takes to send or receive messages. Historically, the term electronic mail was used generically for any electronic document

transmission. For example, several writers in the early 1970s used the term to describe fax document transmission.[3][4] As a result, it is difficult to find the first citation for the use of the term with the more specific meaning it has today. An Internet email message[NB 1] consists of three components, the message envelope, the message header, and the message body. The message header contains control information, including, minimally, an originator's email address and one or more recipient addresses. Usually descriptive information is also added, such as a subject header field and a message submission date/time stamp. Originally a text-only (ASCII) communications medium, Internet email was extended to carry, e.g., text in other character sets, multi-media content attachments, a process standardized in RFC 2045 through 2049. Collectively, these RFCs have come to be called Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME). Subsequent RFC's have proposed standards for internationalized email addresses using UTF-8. Electronic mail predates the inception of the Internet and was in fact a crucial tool in creating it,[5] but the history of modern, global Internet email services reaches back to the early ARPANET. Standards for encoding email messages were proposed as early as 1973 (RFC 561). Conversion from ARPANET to the Internet in the early 1980s produced the core of the current services. An email sent in the early 1970s looks quite similar to a basic text message sent on the Internet today. Network-based email was initially exchanged on the ARPANET in extensions to the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), but is now carried by the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), first published asInternet standard 10 (RFC 821) in 1982. In the process of transporting email messages between systems, SMTP communicates delivery parameters using a message envelope separate from the message (header and body) itself. Types Web-based email (webmail) This is the type of email that most users are familiar with. Many free email providers host their serves as web-based email (e.g. AOL Mail, Gmail, Outlook.com and Yahoo! Mail). This allows users to log into the email account by using a web browser to send and receive their email. Its main disadvantage is the need to be connected to the internet while using it. Other software tools exist which integrate parts of the webmail functionality into the OS (e.g. creating messages directly from third party applications via MAPI). POP3 email services POP3 is the acronym for Post Office Protocol 3. It is a leading email account type on the Internet. In a POP3 email account, email messages are downloaded to the client device (i.e. a computer) and then they are deleted from the mail server. It is difficult to save and view messages on

multiple devices. Also, the messages sent from the computer are not copied to the Sent Items folder on the devices. The messages are deleted from the server to make room for more incoming messages. POP supports simple download-and-delete requirements for access to remote mailboxes (termed maildrop in the POP RFC's).[72] Although most POP clients have an option to leave messages on the server after downloading a copy of them, most e-mail clients using POP3 simply connect, retrieve all messages, store them on the client device as new messages, delete them from the server, and then disconnect. Other protocols, notably IMAP, (Internet Message Access Protocol) provide more complete and complex remote access to typical mailbox operations. Many e-mail clients support POP as well as IMAP to retrieve messages; however, fewer Internet Service Providers (ISPs) support IMAP.[citation needed] IMAP email servers IMAP refers to Internet Message Access Protocol. It is an alternative to the POP3 email. With an IMAP account, a user's account has access to mail folders on the mail server and can use any compatible device to read messages, as long as such a device can access the server. It shows the headers of messages, the sender and the subject and the device needs to request to download specific messages. Usually mail is saved on a mail server, therefore it is safer and it is backed up on an email server. MAPI email servers Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is a messaging architecture and a Component Object Model based API for Microsoft Windows. Pros The problem of logistics: Much of the business world relies upon communications between people who are not physically in the same building, area or even country; setting up and attending an in-person meeting, telephone call, or conference call can be inconvenient, timeconsuming, and costly. Email provides a way to exchange information between two or more people with no set-up costs and that is generally far less expensive than physical meetings or phone calls. The problem of synchronisation: With real time communication by meetings or phone calls, participants have to work on the same schedule, and each participant must spend the same amount of time in the meeting or call. Email allows asynchrony: each participant may control their schedule independently. Cons Most business workers today spend from one to two hours of their working day on email: reading, ordering, sorting, 're-contextualizing' fragmented information, and writing email.[75] The use of email is increasing due to increasing levels of globalisation labour division and outsourcing amongst other things. Email can lead to some well-known problems:

Loss of context: which means that the context is lost forever; there is no way to get the text back. Information in context (as in a newspaper) is much easier and faster to understand than unedited and sometimes unrelated fragments of information. Communicating in context can only be achieved when both parties have a full understanding of the context and issue in question. Information overload: Email is a push technology the sender controls who receives the information. Convenient availability of mailing lists and use of "copy all" can lead to people receiving unwanted or irrelevant information of no use to them. Inconsistency: Email can duplicate information. This can be a problem when a large team is working on documents and information while not in constant contact with the other members of their team. Liability. Statements made in an email can be deemed legally binding and be used against a party in a court of law.[76]

Despite these disadvantages, email has become the most widely used medium of communication within the business world. In fact, a 2010 study on workplace communication, found that 83% of U.S. knowledge workers felt that email was critical to their success and productivity at work.[77] Short Message Service Short Message Service (SMS) is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardizedcommunications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices. SMS is the most widely used data application in the world, with 3.5 billion active users, or 78% of all mobile phone subscribers. The term "SMS" is used for all types of short text messaging and the user activity itself in many parts of the world. SMS is also employed in direct marketing, known as SMS marketing. SMS as used on modern handsets originated from radio telegraphy in radio memo pagers using standardized phone protocols. These were defined in 1985 as part of the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) series of standards as a means of sending messages of up to 160 characters to and from GSM mobile handsets.Though most SMS messages are mobile-to-mobile text messages, support for the service has expanded to include other mobile technologies, such as ANSI CDMA networks and Digital AMPS, as well as satellite and landline networks. Greeting card A greeting card is an illustrated, folded card featuring an expression of friendship or other sentiment. Although greeting cards are usually given on special occasions such as birthdays, Christmas or other holidays, they are also sent to convey thanks or express other

feeling. Greeting cards, usually packaged with an envelope, come in a variety of styles. There are both mass-produced as well as handmade versions that are distributed by hundreds of companies large and small. While typically inexpensive, more elaborate cards with die-cuts or glued-on decorations may be more expensive. Hallmark Cards and American Greetings are the largest producers of greeting cards in the world. In the United Kingdom, it is estimated that one billion pounds are spent on greeting cards every year, with the average person sending 55 cards per year. In western countries and increasingly in other societies, many people traditionally mail seasonally themed cards to their friends and relatives in December. Many service businesses also send cards to their customers in this season, usually with a universally acceptable non-religious message such as "happy holidays" or "seasons's greetings". The Greeting Card Association is an international trade organization representing the interests of greeting card and stationery manufacturers. John Beeder, former president of the Greeting Card Association, says greeting cards are effective tools to communicate important feelings to people you care about: "Anyone feels great when they receive an unexpected card in the mail. For me, theres nothing like a greeting card to send a special message. Im proud to be a part of an industry that not only keeps people connected, but uses both imagery and the power of words to help us express our emotions. Contents

1 Types of greeting cards 2 History 3 Postcards 4 See also 5 References Standard Greeting Cards: A standard greeting card is printed on high-quality paper (such as card stock), and is rectangular and folded, with a picture or decorative motif on the front. Inside is a pre-printed message appropriate for the occasion, along with a blank space for the sender to add a signature or handwritten message. A matching envelope is sold with the card. Some cards and envelopes feature fancy materials, such as gold leaf, ribbons or glitter. Photo Greeting Cards: In recent years, photo greeting cards have gained widespread popularity and come in two main types. The first type are photo insert cards in which a hole has been cut in the center. Your photo slides in just like a frame. The second type are printed photo cards in which the photo is combined with artwork and printed, usually on a high-end digital press, directly onto the face of the card. Both types are most popular for sending holiday greetings such as Christmas, Hanukkah & for baby showers. Personalised Greeting Cards: Websites using special personalisation technology, such

as Moonpig, allow consumers to personalise a card which is then printed and sent directly to the recipient. Reusable Greeting Cards: These are greeting cards for the budget conscious. There are two common formats for reusable cards. Firstly there are cards with slits in them positioned to hold pages. Secondly there notepad style cards where pages stick to the back of the cards. The pages that have been used for reusable cards can be removed after being received and fresh pages can be used to reuse the cards. Risqu Greeting Cards: Some companies offer risqu greeting cards, with adult-based humor and cartoons. The humor in these cards can sometimes be offensive to more conservative parts of the population. Musical Greeting Cards: Recently greeting cards have been made that play music or sound when they are opened. They are commonly 3D handmade birthday cards which play traditional celebration songs such as Happy Birthday To You. Electronic Greeting Cards: (also called E-cards) Greeting cards can also be sent electronically. Flash-based cards can be sent by email, and many sites such as Facebook enable you to send greetings. More recently, services have launched which enable you to send greetings to a mobile phone by text message. Many of these electronic services offer open or anonymous chat, to enable further discussion. Pop-Up Cards: Pop-Up Cards are normally cards that, once opened, have a picture coming outward, giving the reader a surprise. Pictures and printed messages in greeting cards come in various styles, from fine art to humorous to profane. Non-specific cards, unrelated to any occasion, might feature a picture (or a pocket to paste in a personal photograph) but no pre-printed message. A custom greeting card made from an ESA/Hubble image The custom of sending greeting cards can be traced back to the ancient Chinese, who exchanged messages of good will to celebrate the New Year, and to the early Egyptians, who conveyed their greetings on papyrus scrolls. By the early 15th century, handmade paper greeting cards were being exchanged in Europe. The Germans are known to have printed New Year's greetings from woodcuts as early as 1400, and handmade paper Valentines were being exchanged in various parts of Europe in the early to mid-15th century, with the oldest Valentine in existence being in the British Museum.[2] By the 1850s, the greeting card had been transformed from a relatively expensive, handmade and hand-delivered gift to a popular and affordable means of personal communication, due largely to advances in printing, mechanization, and a reduction in postal rates with the introduction of the postage stamp.[3] This was followed by new trends like Christmas cards, the first of which appeared in published form in London in 1843 when Sir Henry Cole hired artist John Calcott

Horsley to design a holiday card that he could send to his friends and acquaintances. In the 1860s, companies like Marcus Ward & Co, Goodall and Charles Bennett began the mass production of greeting cards. They employed well known artists such as Kate Greenaway and Walter Crane as illustrators and card designers. Technical developments like color lithography in 1930 propelled the manufactured greeting card industry forward. Humorous greeting cards, known as studio cards, became popular in the late 1940s and 1950s. In the 1970s Recycled Paper Greetings, a small company needing to establish a competing identity against the large companies like Hallmark Cards, began publishing humorous "whimsical" card designs with the artist's name credited on the back. This was away from what was known as the standard look (sometimes called the Hallmark look.)[citation needed] By the 1980s there was a thriving market for what were now called "alternative" greeting cards, and the name stuck even though these "alternative" cards changed the look of the entire industry. The largest recorded number of greeting cards sent to a single person went to Craig Shergold, a beneficiary/victim of chain letters and later chain emails. Postcards[edit source | editbeta] Postcards, which are single-sided without the fold, can function in a manner somewhat similar to greeting cards. Postcards appeared fairly early on in the history of the postal service as a cheaper way of sending messages, especially those of a tourist nature.