Commercial Correspondence and Commercial English [antikvár]

PREFACEAt one time, Commercial English developed a jargon of its own even worse than journalese and very distressing to every educated person whose misfortune it was to have to read letters expressed in it. Fortunately, that is now a thing of the past. For whatever purpose English may be used, it cannot be necessary to degrade it. A business letter is quite as effective, and certainly more agreeable, if it is written in the English acceptable to educated society. This is not to say that the writer of such a letter is required to be a Macaulay, or a Ruskin, but it does mean that he should conform to the usages of approved literature.It is only by reading that the literary sense can be cultivated, and all that can be said here is that the user of this book should steep himself in the writings of our standard authors, whether in prose or verse. The immediate object of the present work is to lay a solid foundation on which the student can confidently build the structure of his own compositionsconfidently, because he will have learnt what errors of construction he should avoid and how to avoid them. Taste will come with wider reading. To correctness, at least this manual will, it is hoped, succeed in pointing the way.