How Office Writing Quietly Got Less Formal Over Three Decades

The Email That Used to Open With 'Dear Mr. Alvarez'

Picture an office message from the late 1980s: a request to someone in another department opens with "Dear Mr. Alvarez," spends a paragraph on pleasantries before getting to the point, and signs off with "Sincerely" above a typed name and title. Internal memos followed the same pattern, and so did notes to a manager two doors down. Nobody found any of this stiff at the time. It was simply how colleagues addressed each other on paper, whether the recipient was a stranger or someone they saw every day at lunch.

Open a work inbox now and the same request looks almost unrecognizable next to that. It opens on a first name, sometimes skips a greeting altogether, states the ask in a line or two, and closes with an initial and nothing else. That shift didn't happen overnight, and it didn't move at the same speed in every industry. It crept in gradually over roughly thirty years, and somewhere in the middle of that creep, a distinct writing style settled into place — one that is neither the old formal letter nor a text message to a friend.

Three Forces Behind the Shift

A few overlapping changes seem to have pushed workplace writing in this direction. Email itself turned correspondence into something closer to conversation than to letter-writing, and once messages started arriving by the dozen instead of the handful, a paragraph of pleasantries on every one stopped being realistic. Chat tools like Slack and Teams then trained the same habits from the other side, rewarding short, quick replies even in threads where a longer message would have fit fine, and those habits bled straight back into email once people were switching between the two all day.

Flatter organizational charts likely played a part too. Fewer companies now expect a junior hire to address a director by anything but a first name, and once that norm loosens, one of the old reasons for formal salutations goes with it — there's less distance left to signal. None of this moved at the same speed everywhere; a litigation firm and an early-stage startup were never on the same clock, and some fields still expect something close to the old style for anything client-facing. But the general drift, across most white-collar workplaces, has run the same way: less ceremony, more speed, and more room to sound like an actual person instead of a letterhead.

The Same Request, Three Decades Apart

Semi-Formal Is Its Own Register, Not Just Relaxed Formal

It's tempting to describe everything between a 1980s memo and a two-word Slack message as one blurry category called "casual." But the writing that fills most of today's inbox actually follows its own fairly consistent rules — first names but complete sentences, some contractions but no slang, no formal salutation but still some kind of greeting. That combination is specific and repeatable enough to deserve its own name: semi-formal. It isn't formal writing with the edges sanded off, and it isn't informal writing dressed up a little. It behaves like a category with its own internal logic.

Semi-Formal Writing, Rule by Rule

When to Dial It Back Up

Semi-formal works for the bulk of day-to-day workplace writing because most of it happens between people who already know each other and just need something done. It stops being the right choice once the audience or the stakes change: a message to an external client you haven't built a relationship with yet, anything that might end up in front of legal or HR, or a note to someone several levels above you at a company with a more traditional culture. In those cases, the older formal habits — full names, complete salutations, no contractions — still do useful work, mainly by signaling that you understand the situation calls for care rather than speed.

The reverse mistake is just as common: writing to a close teammate as if the message needs to survive a court filing, which can come across as oddly distant or even passive-aggressive in a team that's used to a more direct tone. Matching the register to the relationship and the moment, rather than defaulting to whichever style feels safest, is really the whole skill, and it's one most people pick up by trial and error rather than by being taught it directly.

Getting that balance right on a daily basis is partly a grammar problem — a sentence can read as too stiff or too sloppy depending on small choices in phrasing and punctuation that are easy to miss when you're typing quickly between meetings. Running a draft through AI Humanizer Lab's Grammar Checker before hitting send is a quick way to catch those small slips without flattening the message back into something that sounds like a form letter.