160 Essential Skills for Health Careers Success
or stand alone. Some interjections are oh, wow, ugh, hurray, eh, and ah. Inter-
jections should be used infrequently in workplace communications.
Interjections can appear at the beginning of a sentence that expresses
strong emotion. Depending on how much emotion is expressed, a sentence
containing an interjection can end with a period or an exclamation point.
Interjections can also appear alone with an exclamation point.
Examples: No, don’t let the patient walk without help!
Oh, you surprised me.
Ouch!
Sentences
A sentence is a grammatical unit of one or more words that expresses
an independent statement, question, request, command, or exclamation. A
sentence typically has a noun (called the subject) as well as a verb (called
the predicate). Sentences begin with a capital letter and end with the appro-
priate punctuation.
In this age of abbreviated messages in e-mails, text messages, and tweets,
complete sentences are not often used to communicate (Figure 7.16). How-
ever, in the workplace, complete sentences must be used in order to present
professional communication skills and communicate a complete thought.
There are three types of sentences—simple, compound, and complex.
The type of sentence you should use depends on how simple or complex
an idea you wish to express.
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Figure 7.16 Slang used in texting is not appropriate for workplace communication.