ClearTips: Stunning sentences

Direct address

Addressing your readers, as I do throughout this little book, can make your writing more conversational and thus more personal.

If your stocks have risen so much in recent years that they represent an uncomfortably large portion of your assets, you should consider long-term U.S. Treasury bonds.

The personal pronouns your and you draw the reader into the sentence far more than would the impersonal: If stocks have risen so much in recent years that they represent an uncomfortably large portion of an individual's assets, one should consider long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Compare the effect of writing you should consider with that of writing simply consider, the difference between direct address and the imperative.

We know you're reading this.

Turn off a main road, wander into a village, go to see an ancient ruin, and you are in another country, the one where people live as they have for so many thousands of years.

See how the imperatives are softened?

And you, with your western products, training, cash, clout and back-up, are fortunate compared with your local counterparts.

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