The notion of \((\varOmega , \varepsilon )\) -inductive sequents plays an important role in correspondence theory and proof theory. This paper simplifies the definition of \((\varOmega , \varepsilon )\) -inductive sequents for distributive modal logic by ‘internalizing’ the dependency order \(<_\varOmega \) . The new definition is called \(\varepsilon \) -inductive sequents. Furthermore, this paper shows that every \(\varepsilon \) -inductive sequent is elementary by an adapted proof. The adapted proof suggests that the order to eliminate propositional variables in an inductive sequent is irrelevant.