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I'm writing a formal email to my senior and I'm confused which one should I use.

I demonstrated you about the working of XYZ.

I demonstrated about the working of XYZ to you.

I demonstrated XYZ and it's working to you.

Do each of these 3 sentences give a different meaning?

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    I think only the third is grammatical, but may not say what you want it to say. What are you trying to communicate here?
    – Tyler James Young
    May 20, 2014 at 19:18
  • I had demonstrated my project to him and wanted to remind him about it. I think I should go with the third one.
    – Nick_inaw
    May 20, 2014 at 19:28
  • @Tyler: The third one isn't grammatical either. The apostrophised it's is simply wrong, and idiomatically it would almost always be pluralised workings as well.
    – FumbleFingers
    May 20, 2014 at 22:11
  • @Nick_inaw: Unless you have some special reason why you think you should be using the verb "demonstrate" here, you'd almost certainly do better sticking to "show".
    – FumbleFingers
    May 20, 2014 at 22:12
  • @FumbleFingers Good call. I missed that. Nick, we can help a lot more if you can provide more detail about the situation.
    – Tyler James Young
    May 21, 2014 at 1:57

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“The workings” refers to how something works, so “I demonstrated the workings of XYZ” would mean “I demonstrated the way in which XYZ works”.

If you are talking about the fact that something works, you will be better off saying something like “I demonstrated to you that XYZ works.”

This all assumes that you are making a specific reference to a single point in the past. If you are discussing the current state of affairs, you will want to say something like “I have demonstrated to you that XYZ works.”

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