A memorandum or memoranda for plurality, sometimes known as a memo, is a brief statement or record used for internal communication within a company. It is also one of many successful methods for conveying crucial details and particulars to all members of an organization in the form of brief contextualization. Memorandum writing has developed over time from being less structured to being more standardized, with technicality being one of the key issues. This is true for all or the majority of barangay offices around the country. However, despite the uniformity, some memoranda appear to be problematic according to the English Language Structure.
According to George (2022), many of these terms appear, sound, and are even spelled similarly, but they have diverse meanings and are used in other circumstances. Some words sound and seem differently yet have comparable meanings. It's no surprise that writers, both non-native English speakers and native ones, occasionally make poor word choices. This means that content writers are not familiar with some of the English vocabularies and their meanings which lead to ambiguity of the information or confusion of the readers. Aside from vocabulary, usage of punctuation marks, tenses, and subject-verb agreement are considered also contributing factors that make the memoranda ungrammatical.
While each memorandum varies depending on the content writer's background information, it also adheres to stringent formatting guidelines established by the offices. As a result, viewers who are unfamiliar with English language standards see the exhibition of a different structure and syntactic approach to be well-defined. In the following generations, what the content writers did was just edit the names of the concerned persons and some of the information. This action leads to a stigma that what they are doing is correct since it follows the traditional format. This is seen in several barangay offices, where memoranda play an essential part in communication. As a result, some memos are difficult to understand due to confusing material, and some people follow while others do not.
When a memo is developed according to the right template, the intended readership can easily understand what is meant to be communicated. A barangay memorandum that is well and technically written is considered to rigorously follow syntactical criteria; as readers will see, it may also contain the most important information that needs to be stated in a particular memorandum. This is the primary goal of why a series of training related to technical writing must be administered to provide these content writers with technical writing expertise.
It is quite interesting to discover that despite the rigorous training being conducted on the concerned subjects, through intense proofreading, there are still ungrammatical statements found in the different memoranda for both the inter-office and the general public. It seems that the formulator of the memoranda relied only on his/her basic knowledge of sentence structure without considering the choice of words that affect the semantic level of the statement. However, this could be an excuse to the formulators since they are not experts in the English language but what they are after is to send clear information to the receiver of the message.
On the other hand, the common sentence structure utilized in the memoranda is a simple sentence wherein noun phrases and verb phrases are placed into lengthy consideration. This means that the statement has compound subjects and a simple verb or there is a simple subject also but compound verbs. There are phrasal subjects also that make the statement a lengthy one. In addition, there are memoranda appear to be effective in relaying the information due to their conciseness and it gives another indication that its effectivity can be measured upon the automatic response from the target audience. If there is a clarification arises, it means that the memoranda have defectivity in relaying the information.
Finally, the syntactic arrangement of sentences in the memoranda has not been given that much importance by the formulator since the primary purpose is to inform the concerned people about the subject. The usual basis of correct sentence structure is pleasing to the ears, (Guatno, 2013) not only to the listener but also to the formulator. To infer, this is the reason why there are glitches found in the statements. Thus, lengthy sentences are not an issue to the formulator without realizing that chunking of statements is important to see the unity and coherence of the information relayed. Commas and semi-colons are punction marks that help chunk the statement, but they are less utilized. Continuous trainings should be given to the barangay secretaries.