Style of a business letter

4. Style of a business letter

Now I will deal with some common writing problems that do not involve rules of grammar. These problems—of parallelism, redundancy, and the like—are more rhetorical than grammatical; that is, they involve choices you must make as a writer trying to create a certain style of expression. You must determine what stylistic choices will afford greater clarity and cogency to each of your efforts to communicate. We all make different choices when faced with different communicative tasks depending on what we feel will be most effective. An expression that is appropriate for a formal letter may be utterly off-putting in an informal message.

A successful and distinctive writing style is an elusive bird of paradise. It is unmistakable once you see it but difficult to find. It involves many things: creating an appropriate voice for your purpose, choosing the right words for the subject and audience, constructing elegant sentences whose rhythm reinforces their meaning, presenting an argument in a logical fashion that is both engaging and easy to follow, finding vivid images to make thoughts accessible to your readers. You can probably add to this list. You may, for example, want to shock or jolt your audience rather than court it, and this strategy requires stylistic features that are quite different from those you would use for gentle persuasion.

Parallelism

Most memorable writing has as one of its recognizable features the ample use of parallel grammatical structures. A basic guideline about parallel constructions is to make sure that all the elements in a balanced pair or in a series have the same grammatical form. That is, if you start with a that-clause, stick with that-clauses; if you start with an infinitive, stick with infinitives; if you start with a participle, stick with participles; and so on. What you don’t want is a mixed bag, as in She had a strong desire to pursue medicine and for studying literature or The scientist asked for volunteers with allergies but who had not given blood recently.

A second point is to make sure that once you have chosen the kind of grammatical forms you want to make parallel, you structure them symmetrically. Remember that an initial article, preposition, auxiliary verb, or modifier will tend to govern all elements in the series unless it is repeated for each element. For example, if you set up a series of nouns with the first modified by an adjective, the reader will expect the adjective to modify the rest of the series as well. Thus you should say The building has new lighting, plumbing, and carpeting but not The building has new lighting, plumbing, and different carpeting. The same is true for articles: He brought the rod, reel, and bait. If you want to restrict a modifier to only one noun, repeat the article for each noun: He brought the light rod, the reel, and the bait.

When you spot a faulty parallel, recast the structure to give all the elements equivalent treatment. If your new parallel construction does not seem much of an improvement, rewrite the sentence completely to avoid the parallel construction. Better to have no parallel structures than to have parallel structures that sound overblown or stilted.

Faulty parallelism is all around us. We see and hear it every day—often without taking notice. How many times have you heard Please leave your name, number, and a brief message? After waiting for the tone, have you ever objected to the imperfect symmetry of this sentence? In our most recent ballot we presented some sentences with questionable parallelism to the usage panelists to see how tolerant they would be. As we expected, they had a range of opinions.

Crafting sentences with flawless parallelism takes effort and practice. Even if your readers don’t notice or object when you make mistakes, balance and symmetry are worth striving for in your writing. There are certain constructions that are notorious for throwing things out of whack. I listed some of them below.

both … and …

comparisons with as and than

compound verbs

either … or / neither … nor

not only … but also

rather than

Passive Voice

Writing handbooks usually include warnings about the passive voice—it is wordy and clumsy and leads to static rather than dynamic writing. There is truth to this, certainly, but the passive voice also has legitimate uses, and in many instances it is preferable to the active voice.

Such phrases as "The material will be delivered"; "The start date is to be decided"; "The figures must be approved" are obscure ones leaving unsettled who it is that delivers, who decides, and who does the approving. Which side it is to be? Lawsuits are the plausible outcome of leaving it all unsettled. Passives used in contracts can destroy the whole negotiations. "You will deliver" is better for it identifies the one who will do delivering. Certainly, "must be approved by us" violates other canons. "We shall have the right but not the obligation to approve" is less unfortunate.

There is no doubt that passives do not suit business letters, and if they go all the way through without adding something like "by you" or "by us" they are intolerable. Once in a long while one may find passives used purposely to leave something unresolved.

Redundancy

A certain amount of redundancy is built in to the English language, and we would never consider getting rid of it. Take grammatical number, for instance. Sentences such as 'He drives to work' and 'We are happy' contain redundant verb forms. The -s of drives indicates singularity of the subject, but we already know the subject is singular from the singular pronoun he. Similarly, are indicates a plural subject, which is already evident from the plural pronoun we. Number is also indicated redundantly in phrases like this book and those boxes, where the demonstrative adjective shows number and the noun does as well.

But there are redundant ways of saying things that can make the rest of your writing seem foolish. Many of these are common expressions that go unnoticed in casual conversation but that stick out like red flags in writing. Why say at this point in time instead of now, or because of the fact that when because will do? Something that is large in size is really just large. The trouble lies less in the expressions themselves than in their accumulated effect. Anyone can be forgiven for an occasional redundancy, but writing that is larded with redundancies is likely to draw unwanted laughs rather than admiration.

Listed below are some of the more problematic redundancies.

but … however

close proximity

consensus

consider as / deem as

cross section

else

empty rhetoric

equally as

free gift

from whence

inside of

mental telepathy

old adage

rarely ever / seldom ever

reason is because

reason why

refer back

revert back

VAT tax

Wordiness

In a world in which efficiency has become a prime value, most people view economy in wording as a sign of intelligence. Its opposite, therefore, is often considered a sign of stupidity. Most of us are busy and impatient people. We hate to wait. Using too many words is like asking people to stand in line until you get around to the point. It is irritating, which hardly helps when you are trying to win someone’s goodwill or show that you know what you’re talking about. What is worse, using too many words often makes it difficult to understand what is being said. It forces a reader to work hard to figure out what is going on, and in many cases the reader may simply decide it is not worth the effort. Another side effect of verbosity is the tendency to sound overblown, pompous, and evasive. What better way to turn off a reader?

It is easy to recommend concision in expression but much harder to figure out how to achieve it. In general, wordy writing has three distinguishing characteristics: weak verbs, ponderous nouns, and lots of prepositional phrases. The three are interconnected.

The key to writing clearly and concisely is to use strong active verbs. This means that you should only use the passive voice when you have a solid reason for doing so. If you look down a page you have written and see that you are relying on forms of the verb be and other weak verbs like seem and appear, you can often boil down what you have written to a fraction of its size by revising with active verbs.

Here is an example:

It is essential to acknowledge that one of the drawbacks to the increased utilization of part-time employees is that people who are still engaged full-time by the company are less likely to be committed to the recognition and identification of problems in the production area.

This passage has 45 words. We can boil it down to 14 by cutting out the unnecessary words, using active verbs, and using noun modifiers to do the work of prepositional phrases:

Using more part-time employees often makes full-time employees less willing to report production problems.

A certain amount of repetition and redundancy has its uses. It never hurts to thank someone and add that you appreciate what was done. The recapitulation of the major points in a complicated essay can be a generous service to the reader, not a needless repetition. If you keep focused on what you are trying to accomplish and on what will help your readers or your listeners, you will have less need to remember formal rules of good writing. You will be able to trust your instincts and your ear.