Page:When You Write a Letter (1922).pdf/129

 should use the condensed method employed in a telegram and by the omission of subjects, predicates, and articles attempt to say as much as we can in as few words as possible. It is as necessary in a business letter to use complete sentences with all their relationships made evident and with all their physical members intact, as it is in any other sort of letter. Terseness, directness are in no way synonymous with the omission of vital and necessary parts of a sentence.

"Would like catalog of your school," a business man writes me. "Have son who is now in high school and will graduate in spring. Want him to take engineering course. Would like to know cost and possibility of finding good lodging place for him, Yours"

His communication resembles a night letter, kept punctiliously within the conventional fifty words as if he were making a strenuous effort to economize time and to reduce expense, rather than a business letter from an intelligent man who has something normal to say. Translated into English it would read: