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The business letter is not different from other sorts of letters excepting that it has a somewhat different purpose. It is not to amuse or to please or to show social courtesy; its object is to get things done, to present facts, to give information, or to ask for it. Its construction is logical and direct rather than imaginative. Its appeal is to the intellect and to the judgment rather than to the feelings or the emotions. "Business English," about which so much has been said in recent years and about which books even have been written, is not a different genus of English from that employed in any other form of prose discourse. We should use the same forms of correct speech and the same sentence structure in doing business whether orally or in writing as we do in making love or in writing an essay or in giving an after-dinner speech, excepting that our approach and our rhetorical style should perhaps sometimes be different.

In a business letter we should get at the thing on hand at once. This does not mean that in writing such a letter we