

 My English sucks. How much does it devalue my message?  - lewro
http://www.lewro.com/personal/my-english-sucks-how-much-does-it-devalue-my-message#respond

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RiderOfGiraffes
Firstly, I most highly commend you for your existing use of English. It's
_not_ an easy language to learn, and the item you've pointed to is really
rather good - I only spotted a few small errors that matter, and I'm very
picky. It's certainly much, _much_ better than I ever got at French, German,
Danish, Swedish, Bulgarian or Spanish. Overall, they didn't really detract
from the item.

For many people it won't matter much, but for a few it definitely will. You
need to decide how much it matters to you, and if you decide it matters, you
need a copy-editor. You don't want someone to write the copy, you just want
someone to tidy it up and remove the worst of the errors without changing the
content much.

What contacts do you have? My circle of contacts would, for me, each copy-edit
a few hundred words a fortnight. Depending how much I wrote, that would
probably be enough without imposing on them too much. I'd also then buy them a
beer, or cook them a meal every couple of weeks to say thank you.

There are also tools such as the Link Grammar. After spell checking, type what
you want into that and see if you get one parse. If so, you're done. It's easy
to download and install, and not so hard to automate.

That would be my recommendation.

PS: I'm a complete grammar-nazi and am probably much more severe than most
people. Trust me - it was pretty good.

~~~
jimmyjim
>I only spotted a few small errors that matter

Just out of curiosity, can you point out these errors?

~~~
aquadoctorbob
I'm a native speaker of American English. It was certainly readable, but some
of the sentence constructions were stilted enough to distract me. Here's my
extremely pedantic edit, which also changes the tone to be more
conversational:

<http://pastebin.com/f4c49579f>

HTH :)

~~~
jimmyjim
Thanks!

And if anyone wishes to see the changes: paste both texts into
<http://www.quickdiff.com/index.php> and hit 'Compare'

Okay, if any of you actually went through the exercise of pasting it onto
quickdiff.com, you probably noticed how aggravating it was to copy & paste
from that container. Really a bigger turn-off in terms of UI than his English
skills, in my opinion.

~~~
lewro
Thank you for this! I am not sure if I should change the copy now as it would
probably does not make sense for people who would come later to read the
article and there would be no mistakes.

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timurlenk
I've lived in London and in the US for a while and English is my third
language (after Romanian and German). I'm quite proficient in English, not as
good as my mother tongue, but I understand everything that is said to me and
my vocabulary is quite extensive; however my accent is east-european with no
doubt.

What I've found out is that while Americans are a lot more insensitive
(tolerant?) to broken accents the British absolutely can't stand it. They
avoid talking to people with bad accent and will generally walk away form any
conversation with somebody of a non-british accent. I've observed this with
brits around the world, not only in the UK and for sure it's not related to
talking among conationals only: generally they are willing to engage in
conversations with people that are obviously not british as long as they speak
proper english with proper accent.

Of course you can not generalize the above to every brit in the world however
this is my observation.

About blogs I observed in a comparative study that pages not ending in .com
are just a bit less likely to be clicked.

About a written message, what can I say? If the English is badly broken I get
annoyed too. If there are minor spelling mistakes it does not bother me,
substance prevails over form.

~~~
electromagnetic
I'm a brit, and I have a very high tolerance to broken English, however I'm
from the north where Scottish/Welsh/Irish and various non-English-speaking
minorities are much more prevalent and where people generally take more time
with people.

I wouldn't say Americans are more tolerant in general, however I suspect they
are in the California area. I've met a lot of Americans who are very
intolerant of broken accents, the same seems to go in Canada too (where I
currently live). People in the Greater Toronto Area can be much more
intolerant of accents, where as people from the Atlantic and Prairies seem
much more tolerant.

I don't know what causes this intolerance, however I believe it may be caused
by a lack of exposure to different accents. I tolerate accents very well and
tend to have a chameleon-like ability when it comes to moving between areas.
However, I regularly visited France growing up, I had Scottish + Welsh + Irish
teachers throughout high school and have visited lots of European countries,
so I wonder if it's simply due to lack of exposure.

------
JshWright
How many people clicked the down arrow expecting to see more content? What's
the reasoning behind reversing the longstanding tradition of down means down?

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Certainly I did. I understand the reasoning, the arrow shows which way the
text will move. The convention is that the arrow shows where your eyes want to
go.

~~~
lewro
That is good point guys, I will need to change that. Thanks!

------
quant18
Having some grammatical errors definitely sends a signal to your customers. If
you're a large company, it just indicates sloppiness and lack of respect. But
if you're a very small company, it's _not_ necessarily a negative signal.

If I look at a bilingual website for a company I know is run by non-native
English speakers, and the English version is error-free, that tells me it was
probably translated by outsiders. Possibly the company doesn't even have the
capacity to handle Anglophone customers (i.e. no internal staff sufficiently
fluent in English to communicate with me), but just put up the English website
to send a signal to impress their own-language customers with how
"international" they are.

On the other hand, if I see some grammatical errors --- enough to be
noticeable, but not so many as to entirely obscure the message --- it tells me
they probably did it themselves. I.e. somewhere in the organisation there is
some guy who speaks good enough English to describe their product. Maybe with
a hellacious accent and horrible grammar, but at least I'll be able to
communicate with him.

------
angelbob
The linked blog post is certainly quite acceptable, grammatically.

Different audiences have different reactions to bad grammar. Financial
professionals are put off by it, while teenagers expect it. Are you building
ETrade, or MySpace? For something like ETrade, that's a handicap -- get an
editor or a copywriter. For something like MySpace, you're fine.

~~~
lewro
Thanks Noah!

I am building project management application. I expect it to be used by
freelancers and small companies. I guess it would be better if I hire someone.

I hope good copy-righter could help me to present the service in the right
“light”.

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
In the interests of assisting your English:

You mean "copy-writer" as in "one who writes copy (text)". And I don't think
you need someone else to write your copy. I think you just need someone to
make small corrections to your copy. You need a "copy-editor".

I think it's important that the voice is yours, even if someone else helps
with the grammar and/or spelling. Your English is clearly good enough to
communicate what you intend to say. It just needs a little tidying.

------
lewro
@RiderOfGiraffes Thanks a lot for your feedback.

I really appreciate it! Thanks also for pointing me to the right direction. I
am going to check the Link Grammar.

~~~
sgman
On hacker news, you respond to messages using the "reply" link below the
comment rather than using twitter '@' style replies.

~~~
lewro
I am sorry, I missed the reply link. I will know from now on. Thanks!

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
The "Reply" link doesn't show up immediately. On deeper comments it takes
longer to show up, thus discouraging the "flame exchange" problem.

Are you willing to put contact details in your profile? Or email me for more
comments, suggestions and random advice?

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lewro
@marilyn Thank you! I actually read a lot but no novels. I usually read rails,
design books and tech blogs these days. I will need to find some time and
squeeze some novel in so it is not tech oriented content only.

------
francissson
maxklein intentionally uses bad English to be more personable and boost sales.

[http://blog.cubeofm.com/radically-improving-sales-for-
high-p...](http://blog.cubeofm.com/radically-improving-sales-for-high-priced-
pro)

