It is amazing how many letters I see that start with long, dense paragraphs. Not only are they long, they are often sluggish and filled with “wind up” copy.

I nearly always start letters with a short, punchy sentence. As short as one word. As the letter goes on, I slowly introduce longer paragraphs. The idea is to make the letter appear easy to start reading. Once you have someone’s interest, they’ll be willing to read longer paragraphs, though these should be no longer than 7 lines.