Right, question is:
What it the correct format for the address on a letter, including punctuation if any?
The key point is the punctuation part. Or Head has suddenly decided that he wants comma's on the end of each line of an address. Fine for a one off letter but a real pig for doing mass mail merges from SIMS unless you have a highlty trained staff who know how to edit and write code in the field codes (which we don't). Well that or people with the time to manually edit each letter afterwards.
I've found the Royal Mail guidance which asks not to use punctuatiuon in address on the labels which is a start. I also know that I haven't seen a single letter with punctuation in the address in the last 10 years however I'd like to know what the format should be and whether you have references to back it up.
I was certainly taught that each line should have a comma; that said, it is now rare to see it. It shouldn't be that hard to do the mail-merge surely... Can you not use something like:-
<name><punctuation>
<street><punctuation>
<town><punctuation>
<county><punctuation>
<postcode>
where<punctuation>=,
Not tried it, or done any mail merge for a year or two you understand!
Look at letters you receive from companies, they never have punctuation - that's good enough for me.
I'm afraid it's a house-style question... i.e. it depends
These days punctuation is usually omitted from addresses on letters and envelopes. This is the case at my current school, last school and the insurance company where I worked (that had a massive house-style document that we had to abide by!)
Just because many companies (staffed by kids educated by our teaching colleagues) do things one way, doesn't mean that it is right! I wouldn't loose sleep over this one; after all, it is only there for Postie!Originally Posted by maniac
The correct format is to have the correct punctuation after each line but it might be far easier just to gag and tie up your head and lock him in a cellar if you have one. It might take weeks before anyone notices and your admin staff will be much happier.
"Correct" format really does depend on who you ask! Unlike spelling or sentence punctuation, there are no English rules for this sort of thing - it really is style.
I used to teach RSA Word Processing (more than 20 years ago ...) and the rules then were that you could either use commas etc in the address or not use them but you had to be consistent (so if you had 2 letters they must be done in the same way)
As Elsiegee40 says, it's down to house style. Ours is on-line if anyone's bothered (House style) It doesn't deal with addresses but does talk about names - eg J.H. Smith not J H Smith (which I prefer, just like I always use eg in preference to e.g.)
I suspect that house style doesn't get involved in tying up the head teacher in the basement but there could be other rules which affect that :-)
Royal Mail have guidelines on how they want addresses, they also only want 3 lines and the post code:
Name
House Name / Number and Street
Postal Town
County
Postcode
I think that is what it was, we have got our staff told no punctuation, if its needed we put it in the reports and label runs by default.
Never said it was technically right, but it's 'socially acceptable' which means it's good enough for me, after all as you say as long as it does it job, you do have to question does it really matter?
well I was hoping for a slightly
different response but oh well...
the problem with mail merging is where there are a different number of lines in the adddress, e.g. address 1 and address 2 and sometimes address two is blank. blocking the spaces and the extra commas is a awkward. add in that we need the contry on sme addresses but not uk ones its extra complicstions thst i dont think are so easilly resolved. ive seen some stuff on open punctuation i need ro look at. ots just a paiin that this has come out of nowhere and i'm just trying to get our admin staff out of using maintained lists and into direct data exports from our database!
Are you doing the print directly from SIMS or using Word? If it's Word (or Access) then you can put in conditional fields to help with this.
Basically the pseudocode would be:
if address1 <>"" then print address1 & "," else print address1
If you are using Word and this doesn't make sense then shout and I'll dig out some real code.
Alternatively, if you really don't want the hassle then you could try and persuade the Head based on the Royal Mail recommendations but if you've got the sort of Head who likes "the good old days" then you might be fighting a losing battle :-)
Funny you you should say that... apparently it's so parent's don't think that by failing to follow correct guidelines we are failing in education!Would anyone really not send their child to a school as they don't use comma's on their addresses.
I spent some time messing with Word (Basically it's a standard mail merge using SIMS as the data source). Thanks to those clever boffin's at MS I think I can get it to work (in part as you mentioned). Doesn't stop it being more time consuimg and difficult for the less IT literate. Aslo all the information I have found points to modern business letters being contsructed using "open punctuation" where the minimum is used.
From Clear addressing at Mail advice (the direct link adds a session ID that might expire).
When sending mail to UK addresses we need a full and accurate address complete with postcode. You do not need to include a County name provided the post town and postcode are used. Avoid using commas or full stops and do not centre or stagger your lines.
There is some other useful stuff at Postcodes & Addresses explained.
mb
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