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.
I agree completely with this. While it is admirable that you have come this far with your English, poor English will interfere with your message for a lot of people. There is no shame in hiring a copy editor, best selling novelists rely heavily on their editors.
I would also advise that you read more. Pick up a novel that you find interesting. The more you expose yourself to well written English, the better your English will become.
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:
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.
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.
A few years ago for my day job I was technical consultant on a demonstration being given to the Bulgarian Navy. Our equipment worked perfectly from the moment it was installed, so apart from helping our partners solve a problem with their kit, I had very little to do. I had a Bulgarian phrase book, so I decided to test out this technique:
I went to the local shops and bought a copy in Bulgarian of "Men At Arms" by Terry Pratchett, and I set about decrypting it.
As you might expect, I didn't really get all that far in four days, but I was able to go to the local shops and order coffee, comment on the weather, reply to questions about my work, and read the menu. I could also do some actual shopping, with considerable tolerance from the vendors, no doubt, but without anything other than Bulgarian and good will.
We had a formal dinner at the end, and as the Rear Admiral came down the line shaking hands I said "Blagodarya" (can't write Cyrillic) and he stopped dead in his tracks. "You speak Bulgarian?" he asked, in tones of great surprise. "Only a few hundred words - I've only been here 3 days" was my reply. He proceeded to quiz me on common phrases, and seemed surprised and impressed.
Later, when we all got a "Thank You" email, I was the only one whose email was personalised. More, even though that contract was never awarded, we have since been contacted to start negotiations for other work. Clearly the episode made an impression.
Sadly, after leaving I didn't have the chance to continue practising and I lost it all quite quickly, but there was a magic period of a few hours where I was really getting the hang of communicating (comprehension was significantly better than synthesis), and it has made me regret again my mono-lingual background.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
I disagree. Regardless of your target audience, bad grammar and bad spelling are going to make your site look less professional; even teenagers will notice that.
Also, teenagers' bad grammar follows a certain pattern that is quite different than the "I don't speak the language fluently" pattern.
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.
As a quick example, the link grammar immediately highlighted that your second sentence:
> I have been living in London for past 6 years
> and my English still sucks.
doesn't parse. You need a "the" before "past" for natural sounding English. It really might help a lot, and perhaps get your error rate down to an acceptable level without having to pay for external assistance.
As a footnote, in the fourth sentence it did not pick up that you meant "conversation" and not "conversion."
@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.
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.