What would be the proper way to address such a company in a formal letter?
ms consultants (www.msconsultants.com) and truenorth (www.truenorth.org) seem to be very thorough about spelling out their names in a very particular way on their websites. truenorth even italicizes and bolds half of their name.
So would there be a correct way to designate these companies in the inside address or beginning a sentence?
For the inside address I would keep it lowercase. As the first word of a sentence, I would capitalize it. I wouldn’t pay attention to honoring italics and bolding, although it seems that in truenorth’s literature, they always keep it lowercase and they both italicize and bold it. It’s all a question of style–there’s no real one “correct” way to do it.
(Oh, and i hate that plaintext-bold-no spaces typesetting (or other variation, like italic-bold-no spaces) of brand names. It looks cliched and lazy design to me.)
The proper way to address such companies is with insufferable pretension. For example, you should right-justify all your text, and you should choose one letter to capitalize no matter where it appearS or how dumb it lookS. Besides, “truenorth” is just a cheezy midwest convenience store chain. Who are they fooling with the .org domain? Why do they deserve a formal letter? I mean, sorry to be so unhelpful, but if somebody asked you how to make Barney like them, wouldn’t your instinct be to ask them why?