Know-How Exchange : Copywriting

Frances,

You have been given some pretty good examples.I'd say Agnieszka is right pointing out to some specific problems ESL writers& speakers may encounter.
In order to make it a bit more general I'd suggest more holistic approach to possible language touchpoints i.e.
- culture( like East-West),
- religion( Islam,budhism)
- inadequate vocational education(some ESL business writers have not mastered the domains they are writing about)
-insufficient immersion in English business language on 24/7 basis, hence they tend to be more formal than necessary
-native language specifities; depending on the language of origin,speakers and writers are vulnerable to blunders you would find inconceivable or extremely funny.
That said I would say that it will be very hard to specify all kinds of problems ESL writers& speakers find cumbersome unless a thorough research covering all above issues is carried out.You should also be well aware of the fact that in some cases ESL writers themselves have no way of figuring out what kinds of blunders they happen to make.

Rgds

Adam

Many of the blunders mentioned above can be found in EFL examples as well as in ESL. It's as if a lack of emotional intelligence stunts our brain's language centres just like a lack of linguistic experience and practice.

You don't need to go far to find examples. Trawl through some of the student questions on KHE and you will find a few... (I don't want to identify any specifically).

English is a deeply complex and rich language. As are other languages, of course... But that language complexity provides many ways to trip up the unwary speaker or writer. And some of the wary ones, too.

Perhaps there is an opportunity for English speaking/writing experts to offer a sanitisation service to ESL users to fix any gaffes before they are released on an unsuspecting audience.

But I doubt even that would prevent the problem occurring. I've seen too many EFL users fail to communicate their messages clearly.

Perhaps a better mechanism might be to have multiple testing of an ESL piece to check the tone and construction achieves the writers intended objectives. But that would be slow and cumbersome.

I'm reminded of some of the brandname examples that defy understanding. Names like Pschitt! and Pocari Sweat, for example. What the???

Achieving uniformity and consistent standards seems an impossible task - although perhaps technology might one day embed this into the devices we use for communication.

Good luck with your quest here...

ChrisB

There's a company here in the US called "Communcation Fitness" (www.comfit.com), and they have particular expertise in both business communication and ESL. I've been working with them for more than 12 years now, and they've learned some interesting things that bear on this subject.

First, the difficulties with English are different for people whose native languages are different. Mandarin-speakers, for example, have different problems than Spanish-speakers. These differences are far more important in teaching ESL than any common problems.

At one point Communication Fitness had at least 12 different modules for speakers of different languages. Then they did something very clever. They created a diagnostic tool that could identify the specific problems of each individual and customize the program to focus on the specific needs of each person. What language they spoke (other than English) became unimportant because it was the PROBLEM in English that became the focus.

Second, business communication is truly a sub-set of communication skills in general. People who speak/write well in a non-business situation tend to be better business communicators than others. The key to business communication isn't so much the industry jargon but the ability to think clearly, focus on the objective, and organize the contents for easy reading and understanding.

I'm probably not doing a great job of summarizing the learning or addressing the question you have asked, but I found the Communication Fitness experience very enlightening myself.

If any of you want to experiment with Communication Fitness, contact me personally and I'll give you a trial subscription under my company name. I think you may enjoy this unique approach to improving communication skills. Check out their site first, though, to be sure it's something you want to spend time on: www.comfit.com .

(The principal at Communication Fitness is a client and friend, and he is the one who encouraged me to write my first solo book. He's also an accomplished author himself, with more than two dozen books on a wide range of topics.)

Frances

I used EFL as an abbreviation for English as a First Language - as distinct from Second. Sorry for any confusion.

In my experience there are many manglers of the language who cannot use the excuse that it's not their first language... They just aren't very particular with the one and only language they do have!

Written language usage forces people to crystallise a thought pattern and freeze it, immovably, on the page. In verbal usage they might meander on with "You know" and "so she goes, like" and so on. But when forced to live with one final version without the benefit of adjustment based on their perception of the listener's reception of their verbal meanderings, they are far too easily satisfied with their first attempt. Off-topic I know, sorry.

E2L users are more likely to form bad habits inherited from their teachers, or develop self-cultivated bad habits, without good quality feedback and gentle correction from people who may have a better understanding of the language.

I learned to use English by the seat of my pants, like most English kids did. Only when I learned Latin did I start to understand how it all worked. Somehow I needed Latin to enable me to see the whole tool-set for language, to be able to understand how to strip words down on the bench and reassemble them so they worked better together.

And then there's the rules. Like "Never end a sentence with a preposition"... As Winston Churchill once scribbled on a writer's draft speech "This is the sort of stuff, up with which I will not put!"

Perhaps some people are reluctant to constructively critique an ESL user's words because they don't want to discourage them. And because they feel they can't speak the non-English first language of that person, so how can they criticise their errors in ESL?

We all need to realise we can always improve.

Even first language users...

Cheers

ChrisB

A Southern belle got on an airplane and was seated next to a New England blue-blood. Almost as soon as she was seated the Southerner, in her deepest drawl, said, "So, honey, where y'all from?"

The New Englander looked at the belle and in her most proper diction and icy manner said, "Where I come from they teach us not to end our sentences with a preposition."

The Southern belle hesitated for just a second or two, then responded, "OK. Then where y'all from, bitch?"

hi frances

great reponse from experts. my 2 cents, from Bangladesh, where English is the Business Language, the only country proud to have sacrificed lives to establish our mother tongue Bengali as the National Language...

MAIN PROBLEMS FACED BY ESL SPEAKERS AND TYPICAL BLUNDERS
1. the confusion of when to use present perfect tense and past indefinite tense, specially to describe a situatiuon where two activites occurred in past

2. subejct-verb agreement is another problem. i.e. most ESL speakers will write "The Prime Minister, along with her ministers, have visited the area". The correct verb would be HAS instead of have.

3. Most of the ESL speakers do a direct translation from their native language into English resulting in grammatically worong sentences. they do this becoz they first think the sentence in their native language and then translate into english. like Virago mentioned for Mandarin, every language has its own way of speaking which when translated directly ends up in wrong English.

4. i agree with Sham, that to be perfect in English the ESL speakers have to think in English to write correctly.

5. most ESL speakers have a problems in using appropriate articles and preposition.

6. ESL speakers find it difficult to use Idioms and Phrases properly.

7. the mix of British and American spelling in one single writing. you will see CENTRE and COLOR in the same piece of writing.

8. Little exposure to real spoken language

9. limited knowledge of vocabulary and grammer

CULTURAL DISCREPANCIES
1. while the word 'cousin' can refer to a male or female, in India, to refer to a male cousin they say "Cousin Brother" and similarly "Cousin Sister". Interestingly this cultural discrepancy is recognized by Oxford English Dictionary.

2. refer to point#7 the mix and confusion of which spelling standard, wither British or American, to be used. here in Bangladesh, some use British while some American.

hope that sheds some light...

just for information, the UN has declared 21st February of every year as the International Mother Language Day comemorating Bangladesh's language struggle. on 21st February 1952, hundreds of people, mostly students of Dhaka University, sacrficed thier lives in police firing when they protested the then Pakistan Govts' (as Bangladesh was part of Pakistan as East Pakistan) imposition of Urdu as National Language, whereby Bangladesh (erstwhile East Pakistan) was the largest province and we Bengalis were the majority populace of Pakistan. No other nation has sacrificed so much to have its mother tongue established.

Long Live Bangladesh!!

Hi Frances,

It is really an interesting topic to discuss, especially taking into account that we have people from different countries posting here.

Great replies above, I'd have to agree with many of them.
For instance, one of my problems is using articles, like Agnieszka have mentioned. I live in Ukraine and we simply don't have them in my language.

I would mention also that one of the biggest problems here is using the gerund and infinitive correctly. We don't have gerund in my language.
Compare: the verb "stop" + gerund and "stop" + infinitive have different meaning in English:
e.g. "He stopped reading a newspaper" means "He was reading a newspaper and now he doesn't read it anymore".
e.g. "He stopped to read a newspaper" means "He was walking and now he stopped in order to read a newspaper"
In Ukrainian (and Russian) the verb "to stop" has two different verbs for these two cases: "Vin perestav chytaty gazetu" and "Vin zupynyvsya schob pochytaty gazetu"

I could give you much more examples of different usage of the gerund and infinitive in English and Ukrainian. Improper use of gerund and infinitive in business writing are very common, and they can drastically change the meaning of this or that phrase and thus (sometimes) even the whole document or conversation.

It is only one of things I can think of right now, I'll maybe write some more later.

Thank you for a great topic, once again. :)

Yaroslava

P.S. Cool joke from mgoodman, and "The Rules of Writing" by LittleWhacky is a true killer! :D

My sense is that business folks in the US market, who typically have less international contact than, say, Europeans, are overly sensitive to many of the subtle issues raised above. It often seems to me that many "foreign" writers just don't seem very concerned about this "problem". After all, if they cared, they would hire an editor.

If I'm reading between the lines correctly, you are interested in providing some sort of service (training, editing?) to these folks. If so, you will need to begin by convincing them that these communications problems are many times more serious than they believe them to be.

Hi Frances,

I have been thinking about this question for a few days, so I can give a clear simple answer.

From what I have observed about ESL speakers online in chat rooms and message boards, most that have VERY GOOD English skills tend to say at the beginning "Sorry for my bad English". If they didn't say anything I would have thought they spoke English as a first language.

When ever I see that I all ways send them a note saying that there English was BETTER than most English speaker, which it IS.

Then there are the ESL speakers that have some English skills, mostly young people 15 to 25 ish. They tend to put text speck or txt in their version of English.

They use "u" instead of "you"

h r u instead of "how are you"

But they also seem you use English words that don't get used very often. So I sort of know what they mean but I am not very sure. Often I have to go and look at a dictionary to find the word that they are talking about. I normally find that the word is what I believed it to be but it is a great way to increase in vocabulary.

One of my friends who is from Malaysia has very good English skills. He was the high call DUX, which means that he had the highest marks in our school; this was the year before you go to university.

When I was looking at his marks from when he was in Malaysia I noticed that they were all in the 90%, English 90%, Math’s 100%, etch etc until I got to Malaysian language 59%. When I asked him why he got such a bad mark he told me that English was easier to learn, speck and write.

He told me that in English if you don't know a work then you can sound it out and you might have a chance of remembering what the word is for, but in Malaysian you either know the word or you don't, there is no way to guess what it means.

Other ESL students that I have spoken to also say that English is easier to learn, it is only the exceptions to the rules that are hard.

When EVER they say that, I can say with certainty that an English speaker will say "even I don't know the exceptions don't worry about it".

When I was in primary school we were NEVER taught grammar, they always said "You will learn it next year" and then when I got to the next year they said "You should have learn it last year". So even as an English speaker for 20 years, I STILL can’t use grammar correctly. I don't know how my parents or all the other people learned it; I am slowly picking it up.

NoExpress really?

Then how did these happen?

www.engrish.com


Note: I also know there are MANY sites like this but reversed, so Japanese that has been use incorrectly in English products.

Love this thread, Frances and Suze!

Being from Texas, some people may think that *I* am an ESL victim. It's all a matter of perspective, I guess.

Here's how I'd sum up my own observation about ESL folks, especially when they're trying to communicate in writing:
They're too damn polite.

">
U