| Comment | I agree with Gloria and AndreasS: 'Dear Dr. Doe.' You can leave off the title altogether on the envelope and it will be correct, but you need it for the salutation of the letter. When in doubt, it's safer to use Dr. if there's a reasonable chance it will be right, because if that really is the person's title, substituting Mr./Mrs./Ms. is not an option. The only other possibility is just 'Dear John Doe,' but that looks awfully like a form letter written by a computer.
I would only add that even in conversation, you can't really call someone Mr./Ms./Mrs. _instead of_ Dr.; it just doesn't work that way in English. (Except perhaps with women who use their own last name at work and their husband's last name with Mrs. socially, but that's uncommon nowadays.) If you don't want to be called Dr. Smith (Prof. Smith, Rev. Smith, Judge Smith, Col. Smith, etc.), the only alternative, at least in AE, is to invite people to use your first name. This is one of the reasons why first names are common in English even among colleagues, not just friends.
At least, that's true of medical doctors and academics. People who hold a PhD but work in industry or a different field could indeed choose to go by Mr./Mrs./Ms. instead, though it should be their choice. And there are some professions, such as lawyers, where the standard graduate degree for English speakers is simply not a doctoral degree, so for a German speaker to use the title Dr. could sound rather unusual, like a law professor rather than a lawyer -- perhaps not unlike adding an engineering degree after one's last name, which also just isn't usually done in English. |
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