Is Letter Writing Really About Good Grammar?

2. Use the present tense. Your letter must be current, not past or future tense.

3. Use the second person. Don’t write, “Our donors will be proud to participate in this project.” Instead, write, “You will be proud to participate in this project.” The magic word is always “you.”

4. Use connectives and action words to hook sentences and paragraphs together. Always avoid a passive beginning of a paragraph. This includes, for example, “the” and “a.” Also, beware of beginning a paragraph with a prepositional phrase. Instead, use an action word or a strong connective word. An action word might be something like, “wait,” “discover,” “explore,” “stop,” “start” and so on. A connective word might simply be “and” or “so” or “but.”