Page 123 - How to write effective business English your guide to excellent professional communication by Fiona Talbot

112 How to Write Effective Business English

Here is an example of ‘a’ in this usage:

Cheese for sale: six euros a kilo, not ‘six euros the kilo’, as
many non-NE writers would expect.

As an interesting aside, note that in English, goods are described as
being ‘for sale’. Some cultures express it the reverse way: ‘to buy’.
English speakers would say and write ‘House for sale’, not ‘House
to buy’. That said, I’ve noticed some house signs recently with the
legend ‘Buy me’ – using personification as a marketing tool.
Now let’s say a company receives this e-mail: ‘Please can you let
me know how long an order will take to deliver?’ The company will
consider the question as tentative – and thus non-specific. There is
no order, only a general enquiry about how long it would take if
somebody did place an order. Now let’s say the company receives
this enquiry: ‘Please can you tell me how long the order will take to
deliver?’ The word ‘the’ makes this enquiry far more specific. The
question is more likely to relate to an order that has been placed.

Paragraphs

Paragraphs help your reader understand the organization of your
writing because each paragraph is a group of sentences about a
topic. Your key messages become easy to identify and the format
makes it easy for you to develop them. Paragraph headings (and
sub-headings so often used on the web) are increasingly used to
signpost messages and highlight structure for readers’ ease.

Brackets, bullet points and dashes

Use these to break up text (especially if it’s rather lengthy) so your
reader is not overwhelmed, and you can also use commas, as I am
doing here, to make a longish sentence more manageable. On the
reverse side, too many short sentences can seem abrupt. So keep
your writing interesting by mixing and matching these features, to
vary and enhance your style.