Most professionals who
were born outside the
United States struggle
with American-style
business writing. Even
people fluent in English
often have difficulty with the current
penchant for short and simple emails,
memos and bullet point-laden reports.
Fortunately, an increasing number of
corporations now schedules training
specifically to help people from other
nations, including Brazil,
Russia, India and China,
alter their writing styles to
fit demanding Western audiences.
What about the flip side?
How can American-born
writers, especially professional speakers, write more
effective and easy-to-under-stand messages to people
who grew up with other languages, such as Portuguese or Mandarin?
Over the past decade, I have spoken on business communication with
people from 50 different countries
and developed specific strategies to
improve understanding by global readers. So, the next time you’re preparing
marketing materials, letters of agreement, participant handouts, Power-Point slides or other documents for
international recipients, consider these
helpful tips:
Avoid excessive use of synonyms.
Compared to most other languages,
English has an enormous vocabulary.
People from many parts of the world
use a single term for each person, place
or thing: a rose is a rose is a rose.
Global readers can become hopelessly confused if you start your
presentation outline referring to your key points as
“concepts,” and then switch to
“ideas,” move on to “theories” and
end with “take aways.”
Beware of complicated tenses. Eng-
lish has 12 different tenses, includ-
ing a wildly complicated form called
future perfect conditional. That verb
alone contains four dif-
Increase reader ferent words, as in “By
comprehension 3 p.m., I will have been giving this speech for 30
dramatically minutes.” Some Asian
by arranging languages express time
changes solely by con-
your ideas in text. An example:
subject-verb- “Today, I speak. Yester-
day, I speak. Tomorrow,
object order. I speak.” The verb is
consistent.
Reconsider idioms. When writing a
letter confirming your speaking engagement, you may be tempted to toss off
an upbeat, casual sentence such as “I
plan to knock the group’s socks off.”
Stop right now. Idioms, defined as terms
where literal translation fails to convey
the correct meaning, are among the top
barriers in global writing. To make the
same idea understandable to everyone,
write “I plan to impress the audience.”
Simplify sentences. You can increase
global reader comprehension dramatically just by arranging your ideas in
subject-verb-object order. In everyday
terms, this structure means you explain
who did what to whom. This pattern
taps into the way human beings across
cultures process information. Instead of
writing “Following my keynote speech,
which will be about 40 minutes, participants will be given an opportunity
to ask questions,” consider “I’ll have a
question-and-answer period after my
40-minute keynote speech.”
Remember your manners. Compared
to the United States, other cultures put
more value on niceties, especially greetings. Although American business writers increasingly are dropping formal
salutations and closings, particularly in
emails, you may want to buck this trend
with global audiences. At the very least,
take a few seconds to include the recipient’s name at the top and your regards
at the end of every email.
Kathleen A. Begley, PhD, specializes in communications programs for professionals with English as a Foreign Language (EFL). She is the author of seven
books, including Writing Persuasively: Getting Your Ideas Across in Business.
Her father, Thomas Begley, spoke only Gaelic as a child growing up in a
thatched roof cottage on a remote peninsula in County Donegal, Ireland. She
can be reached at kbegley@writecompanyplus.com
