# Business Letter Introduction: What to Write in the First Paragraph Canonical URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-introduction/ Markdown URL: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-introduction.md Entity type: Article Last updated: 2026-07-07 Language: en Primary audience: professionals improving communication at work Owner: Headway Skills Contact: https://headwayskills.com/contact/ ## Short answer A business letter introduction has one job: say who you are and why you're writing. Seven steps to an opening paragraph that gets read to the end. ## Key facts - Title: Business Letter Introduction: What to Write in the First Paragraph - Category: Communication - Primary skill: Communication - Related skills: Influence, Networking - Primary keyword: business letter introduction - Source page: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-introduction/ ## What this page covers - A business letter introduction has one job: say who you are and why you're writing. Seven steps to an opening paragraph that gets read to the end. - Practical guidance for business letter introduction - How this topic connects to Communication ## Detailed explanation Most people spend longer on the first four lines of a business letter than on everything that follows. A business letter introduction should greet the recipient by name, say who you are if they do not already know you, and state your reason for writing — all inside about two sentences. Detail, background, and whatever case you want to make belong in the paragraph after it. Knowing that is not the same as being able to write it. The opening has two jobs at once: it has to be correct, and it has to give [someone who owes you nothing](/knowledge/networking/networking-email/) a reason to read on. Those pull in different directions, which is why the shortest paragraph in the letter takes the longest to write. ## How to write a business letter introduction, step by step Settle one thing first, because search results for this phrase cover two different needs. Sometimes it means the opening paragraph of any business letter — a request, a complaint, a follow-up. Sometimes it means a letter of introduction, whose whole purpose is to introduce you or your company to someone who does not know you yet. The steps below serve both, because a letter of introduction is simply the case where the opening paragraph carries the most weight. It helps to see how little room you have. Johns Hopkins University's guidance on introduction letters puts the whole letter at roughly four paragraphs on a single page, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center describes [the conventional business letter](/knowledge/communication/formal-business-letter/) as three: an opening that states the main points, a body that supplies the detail, and a close that says what should happen next. Your introduction is one of three or four paragraphs. It is not a runway. ### 1. Find the recipient's name before you write anything Do this first, because it changes the salutation, the register, and often the reason you end up giving for writing. Indeed's guidance on business letter salutations is blunt about it: if you do not know the person's name, try to find it. The company website, a team page, a professional profile, or a short call to reception will usually produce it. Only when it genuinely cannot be found do you fall back to a title. Skipping this costs more than it looks. Guides on common business letter errors put addressing the recipient incorrectly near the top of the list, and the reason is simple — a misspelled name or an outdated job title tells the reader you did not check, and that impression lands before your first sentence does. ### 2. Choose the salutation your research earned "Dear" is still the professional default, and the working rule across business writing sources is that when in doubt, you use it. With a name, that is all you need: "Dear Ms. Okafor," or "Dear Dr. Lindqvist,". Where first names are normal in that organization and you have had some contact already, "Dear Sara," is fine. Without a name, Indeed's advice is to address the senior job title most closely connected to your reason for writing — the head of the department you are approaching, for instance. "Dear Sir or Madam" remains the accepted formal fallback and is safe in any business setting. What to avoid is "To Whom It May Concern," which these sources now describe as impersonal and outdated. It quietly announces that you never found out who you were writing to. ### 3. Say who you are, in one line, and only if they need it If the recipient does not know you, Indeed's guidance on starting a business letter is to include a brief personal introduction and, where there is one, a reference to previous contact for context. That is a single sentence: your name, your role, your organization, and the connection if it exists — an event you both attended, a colleague who suggested you write, an earlier exchange. Keep any description of your company to two or three lines at most. The advice that recurs across introduction-letter guides is personalized, easy to read, and short. And if the recipient already knows exactly who you are, skip this step. Re-introducing yourself to someone you spoke to last week reads as filler. ### 4. State your purpose in the very next sentence Purdue OWL's business letter guidance describes the first paragraph as a friendly opening followed by a statement of the main point — a couple of sentences explaining the purpose, with no detail until the next paragraph. The order matters more than the wording. Business Letters for Busy People sets out the same sequence for the letter as a whole: state your purpose, explain your information fully, request the action you want, then close and thank the reader. What fights this is a social instinct. In conversation you would warm up before arriving at the point, and doing the same on paper feels more polite. It reads as evasive instead, and it spends the one paragraph you can be reasonably sure will be read. ### 5. Give the recipient a reason to care, in their terms An introduction letter, unlike a proposal or [a sales pitch](/knowledge/influence/pitching-ideas/), makes no demands and proposes no terms. Its only job is to open a door that a later conversation can walk through, which means the opening has to answer a question the reader is already asking: why is this relevant to me? Commercial writing guides recommend a strong first line to stand out among the similar letters a recipient gets — a striking statistic, a bold claim, a rhetorical question. Handle that advice with care. It works when the claim is specific and true of this particular reader, and it reads as marketing the moment it is generic. The lower-risk version is to name the thing about their situation that actually prompted you to write: something they announced, published, hired for, or built. This is where the real difficulty sits, and it is worth naming plainly: the hard part of an opening is not the phrasing, it is judging what the person on the other end needs to hear. That is a skill rather than a knack, which also means it can be measured — it takes a few minutes to [check where your skills stand](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/), and that is a better use of the time than rewriting the same paragraph again. ### 6. Hand the reader over to the body The last move of the introduction is a transition, not an explanation. Purdue OWL is explicit that the detail waits for the following paragraph, and error guides name the opposite failure repeatedly: letters that drift off topic, or that never quite explain the reason for writing, get set aside and not picked back up. One sentence does it — the point you are about to develop, or the question the body will answer. If your introduction has started listing evidence, it has already stopped being an introduction. ### 7. Cut it, then read it aloud Business writing sources converge on directness: be to the point, and [avoid vague language](/knowledge/communication/business-writing/) and beating around the bush. Vagueness is what survives a first draft, so read the paragraph back and delete any sentence that does not say who you are, why you are writing, or why it matters to the reader. Then read it out loud. That catches what a silent check misses — a tone stiffer or more familiar than you meant, a sentence that does not quite land. Finish with the mechanical pass: the spelling of the name, the job title, the company name. In a letter whose entire purpose is a first impression, those are the errors that cost the most for the least reason. ## The skills behind an opening a stranger answers Read back through the seven steps and notice how few of them are really about writing. Finding out who to write to, deciding how formal to be, working out what this particular person would find relevant, resisting the urge to explain everything at once — those are judgments about people that happen to be made in a paragraph. **Communication** does most of the work here. Leading with the main point, being brief, being clear and direct, and adapting to the person receiving the message are the principles steps four through seven are built on, and they carry well past letters — the same instincts shape an email, a status update, or a request made in a meeting. Part of the skill is knowing when writing is the right medium at all: a letter suits a first approach and a record of what was agreed, while anything sensitive or genuinely complicated usually goes better as a conversation. **Influence** explains why step five is the hard one. A letter that opens a door works through preparation rather than pressure — understanding what is in it for the person reading, keeping the case simple, making a strong impression from the first line, and following up on whatever you said you would do. That is the difference between a letter that is technically flawless and quietly ignored and one that gets an answer, and it rests on credibility rather than persuasion tricks. **Networking** is the frame most people skip. A letter of introduction is a first contact with someone outside your immediate circle, and the practical rule is that you approach a stranger with a concrete reason — which is exactly what the opening paragraph has to supply. The approaches that work tend to offer something rather than only ask: information they can use, an introduction to someone worth knowing, something you know that they do not. Those three sit among twelve work skills the framework treats as learnable rather than fixed, and they will turn up in every first approach you make after this one. If you would rather begin from a read than a guess, the Work Skills Test [scores all twelve of them](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/) and shows which are already solid and which would repay some deliberate practice. Some of the seven steps probably described things you already do — checking a name before you write it, or cutting a sentence that had started to ramble. That is worth noticing, because it means you have been absorbing this from the work around you rather than waiting to be taught it. The steps that felt less familiar are simply the next few to learn, and learning them asks nothing about who you are. You do not have to become a more formal person, or a more outgoing one; you make a handful of decisions differently and then keep making them. First contacts also do not get rarer as a career goes on. They get more consequential, and they go to people with less time — which makes this a cheap thing to get right now and an expensive thing to keep guessing at. You went looking for how the opening actually works rather than for a template to paste, and that difference is most of what separates people who get better at this from people who rewrite the first paragraph five times. What is missing is a read on where you are starting from. ## Before you write the next one The only thing left is finding out which part of this you actually need to work on. The Work Skills Test is a **free** self-assessment of the skills you use at work: you answer questions about how you operate day to day, and it scores you across all twelve — communication, influence and networking among them — then shows which are already strong and which would repay a little deliberate practice. Take it before the next letter that matters, and you will know whether the thing slowing you down is the wording, the read on the recipient, or the approach itself. **[Take the skills test](https://assessment.headwayskills.com/)** *Free, and about 7 minutes from start to your results.* ## Who this is for - Professionals building practical workplace skills - Readers looking for specific, usable work advice - Managers, educators, and coaches supporting career readiness ## Common questions ### What is this guide about? A business letter introduction has one job: say who you are and why you're writing. Seven steps to an opening paragraph that gets read to the end. ### Which Headway skill does this connect to? This guide connects primarily to Communication. It also relates to Influence, Networking. ### What is the recommended next step? Use the free Work Skills Test to reflect on which work skill to improve next. ## Related pages - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/influence.md - https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/networking.md - https://headwayskills.com/work-skills-test.md ## Citation guidance Use the canonical page when citing this content: https://headwayskills.com/knowledge/communication/business-letter-introduction/ Preferred summary: "A business letter introduction has one job: say who you are and why you're writing. Seven steps to an opening paragraph that gets read to the end." ## Change log - 2026-07-07: Content collection version published.