International Written Communication: Sentences

Video Transcript

"All right, now let's talk about being brief in the context of structure. And when I'm talking about being brief in structure, I want to talk about sentence length and paragraphs. If you have properly got your thoughts together and you know specifically what thoughts you want to share in this correspondence, then this next part should just automatically happen. But you want to be real careful about the length of your sentence. Sometimes in other cultures in their writing, punctuation is even different. So, be real careful about that. Keep your sentences reasonably concise, reasonably short and to the point. And the same thing with your paragraphs. Keep--it's better to have short paragraphs and more of them than long paragraphs or lots of long paragraphs. So again, brief in thought, but when you put it on the paper, keep it brief in structure. And that's the best way to avoid misunderstanding in written correspondence."