24Choose Your Sentence Style With Care
Depending on their tone, sentences can enlighten, entertain, educate, and, on occasion, even annoy. The right combination of sentence styles can be the difference between an e-mail that sings and one that falls flat. For shorter e-mails, one or two sentence types will usually fit the bill, but for longer, more complicated e-mails, a mixture works magic. The following are five basic sentence styles and some suggestions on how to use them to their best advantage.
Declarative sentences. These are sentences that simply state a fact or argument without asking the reader to take any action or choose sides either way. More often than not, they end with the plain old period. For example:
• I needed to work this ...
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