English for Work · Lesson 1 of 6

Being understood beats being correct

Be able to judge a message by whether it lands, not by whether it is grammatically perfect.

Data This lesson: 121KB

A client does not grade your grammar. They decide, in about four seconds, whether dealing with you is going to be easy or hard.

Perfect English delivered late, in a wall of text, with the question buried in paragraph three, loses to plain English delivered fast with the question first.

So the goal of this course is not correctness. It is being clear, quick and easy to reply to. Those three are learnable in a way that native-level fluency is not, and they are what actually gets work.

This matters especially if English is your third language after Urdu and Punjabi. You may never sound like a Londoner. You can absolutely be the easiest person on the project to work with, and that is worth more.

One habit to start now: read your message aloud before sending. Anything you stumble over, the reader will too.

Try it yourself

Find a message you sent recently in English. Rewrite it so the main question is in the first line and it is at least a third shorter. Read both aloud.

Check what you learned

Create your free BvLogic ID to take the quiz and record your score.

Create your BvLogic ID
Continue to lesson 2 All lessons