Of the many types of letters that companies write, one type tends to be overlooked—the transmittal letter. Customer-oriented letters are likely to get handled by the public affairs or public relations branches in companies, but the other professionals, including scientists, engineers, and technicians, will have to write transmittal letters. The transmittal letter is a sort of preface to the document it sends. It may summarize the document's organization and structure; it may explain, in the case of a completion report, what expectations found in the proposal did not work out in the actual research. These discrepancies should be explained at a summary level. It is worth considering the problems that transmittal letters address.
The three major functions of the transmittal letter are