A paragraph to persuade someone not to smoke, please review

Can you please comment whether the following paragraph is 1. grammatically correct 2. how can I increase the variety of sentence structures 3. overall quality of my writing


five million people died last year from lung cancer due to deadly smoking habit. Yet sales of cigarettes increased by 10% this year as compared to last year. Is smoking not waste of time and money ? Is it not injurious to health ? Is it not like one is intentionally burning himself ? Do you want to be like one of those five million died last year ? So think before a cigarette reaches your lips !! You are important for your loved ones.

This will fix an error and increase variety of structures:

Five million people died last year from lung cancer due to the deadly smoking habit of somking, yet sales of cigarettes increased by ten percent this year as compared to last year.

I like your use of questions! But, be sure to place the question mark right next to the word it follows, as follows:

Is smoking not a waste of time and money?

Again, the overall quality of your writing is quite good.

Thanks Simone !!

You might also want to add more details to make your paragraph more persuasive. "Five million people died last year from lung cancer due to deadly smoking habit." Says who? How did they come up with this statistic? Presumably, at least some of the smokers who died from lung cancer would have contracted the disease even if they were not smoking. So, what methodology was used to figure out how greatly smoking increased the risk? What was that increase in risk? How does this risk compare to other dangerous activities, such as driving? That is, supply some context. So, how many smokers are there in the world? What percentage of them develop health problems?

At the moment, your paragraph isn't particularly persuasive, or won't be to an educated audience. Your readers might agree with you to begin with, and so your paragraph may therefore be well-received in spite of not being particularly persuasive, but you should strive to strengthen your case anyway.