“Often businesspeople will use big $10 words because they want to sound intelligent. Instead, they end up sounding like they’re trying too hard.” Start by writing short, declarative sentences.

To reinforce this, I sometimes use this little undergraduate exercise: Find plausible example sentences to fill all the cells of the matrix below. I omit exclamatives because they are less ...

Use question words, such as ‘How much is …?’. Use a declarative sentence, such as ‘I would like … please’. Invert, or swap the order of, the verb and the subject to form a question ...

Sometimes when someone speaks their opinion, they use an “I” statement at the beginning of ... Often, an “I” statement can be turned into a declarative sentence by omitting the “I.” To argue a ...

Questions about its use arise, well, periodically ... Do you need to add a period when a declarative sentence ends with a quoted question?: 1) Joan said, “Is Jill going with us?”.