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A paragraph is composed of several sentences dealing with the same subject. In business terms, of course, much of your letter is going to be dealing with the same subject and one paragraph for a two-page document would be extremely difficult to read. Where you break your paragraphs should, therefore, be a matter of common sense.

The aim of letter writing is to convey information.

Generally speaking, a paragraph should not be more than about fifteen or twenty lines and, in most cases, much shorter than that. There are no fixed rules, but bear in mind that the point of a paragraph is clarity of expression and that short paragraphs are infinitely preferable to long ones.

Business letters tend to be ‘aligned left’ which means that all paragraphs start on the left-hand side of the page and none are indented. This gives a clean, neat look and appears businesslike. When preparing semi-professional letters – to a school head teacher, for example – it may be appropriate to indent the first line of each paragraph since this is a throwback to handwritten letter style and might seem more elegant.

Handwritten letters almost always indent at the beginning of each paragraph on the basis that anything that makes handwriting easier to read is a good thing.

The rest of the layout will depend on the length of your letter. Most of us have received letters which begin at the top corner of the page and then fill the entire blank space with no margins and hardly any paragraphs. This is not going to facilitate the reading of your letter.