How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters), page 169

How to Write Letters (Formerly The Book of Letters), page 169 by Mary Owens Crowther

170

The troublesome items here are numbers three and five. If the dictator is a correspondent then the calculation of how much it costs him to dictate a letter is his salary plus the overhead on the space that he occupies, divided by the number of letters that he writes in an average month. It takes him longer to write a long than a short letter, but routine letters will average fairly over a period of a month. But an executive who writes only letters that cannot be written by correspondents or lower salaried men commonly does so many other things in the course of a day that although his average time of dictation per letter may be ascertained and a cost gotten at, the figure will not be a true cost, for the dictation of an important letter comes only after a consideration of the subject matter which commonly takes much longer than the actual dictation. And then, again, the higher executive is usually an erratic letter writer--he may take two minutes or twenty minutes over an ordinary ten-line letter. Some men read their letters very carefully after transcription. The cost of this must also be reckoned in.

The cost of any letter is therefore a matter of the particular office. It will vary from six or seven cents for a letter made up of form paragraphs to three or four dollars for a letter written by a high-salaried president of a large corporation. A fair average cost for a personally dictated letter written on good paper is computed by one of the leading paper manufacturers, after a considerable survey to be:

Postage .0200 Printing letterheads and envelopes .0062 Stenographic wages (50 letters per day, $20.00 per week) .0727 Office overhead .0727 Paper and envelopes .0054 ------ $.1770

The above does not include the expense of dictation.

It will pay any man who writes a considerable number of letters to discover what his costs are--and then make his letters so effective that there will be fewer of them. < previous next >