English for Work
Lesson 1 of 6 6 lessons · free
English for Work 6 lessons
  1. 1 Being understood beats being correct
  2. 2 The message that gets a reply
  3. 3 Saying you do not know
  4. 4 On a call
  5. 5 Writing a proposal that reads as competent
  6. 6 Keeping a client
  1. ✎ Course lab7 tasks · marked out of 100
  1. ★ CertificateIssued when you finish, verifiable online
Course overview
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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.

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یہ سبق اردو میں پڑھیں

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.

Exercise: 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.

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Up next: 2. The message that gets a reply

Continue to lesson 2 Up next 2. The message that gets a reply