Chapter 5 Chapter Overview & Objectives

Business Style: Sentences and Paragraphs

Chapter Overview

This chapter provides strategies for improving the clarity, correctness, and impact of your sentences and paragraphs. You’ll learn to adjust and vary your sentences according to their length and type to emphasize ideas, convey your purpose, and hold the reader’s interest. You’ll also learn about the concept of voice, the secret to achieving a strong and direct style and to breaking unfavourable news tactfully. You’ll explore options for creating focused, cohesive paragraphs with logical flow and organization. Finally, you’ll learn to identify common sentence errors and how to eliminate them.

Learning Objectives

In this chapter, you will learn to do the following:

  1. Recognize the basic types of sentences.
  2. Improve sentence variety by matching sentence style and length to purpose.
  3. Phrase basic types of questions effectively.
  4. Improve sentence clarity.
  5. Use parallelism to write with consistency and impact.
  6. Emphasize important facts and ideas; minimize less important ones.
  7. Distinguish between active and passive voice.
  8. Identify and eliminate sentence errors that impair clarity and unity.
  9. Develop logical, coherent, and focused paragraphs.
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