How To Sharpen Your Business Writing Skills, Second Edition

4Effective Writing

Learning Objectives

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:

• Define and identify the three basic sentence patterns.

• Explain what a topic sentence is and what it does.

• Explain how to structure sentences to emphasize or deemphasize ideas.

• Demonstrate the use of parallel structure in sentences.

• Rewrite sentences to eliminate misplaced modifiers.

So far in this course, you have learned about focusing and organizing your ideas as you prepare to write, and you have reviewed the most common kinds of business writing. The next step is putting all this together to construct a message with the greatest clarity and ...