Should we write as we speak or speak as we write?

According to Jyoti Sanyal, author of “Indlish—the book for every English-Speaking Indian”, this debate has been going on for centuries. He says that written English began as a write-as-you speak movement. Casual, simple writing was encouraged. A good example of this is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which was very close to the speech of that time. Fifty years later, Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) felt that plain English was not ornate enough and encouraged people to speak as they would write. Thus, began flowery language. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) reversed the rule again when he said that poetry should use the real language of men. Then, the Victorians brought back pompous writing into vogue. The famous Charles Dickens’ character Micawber in David Copperfield was so afraid of speaking ordinarily that he always wrote down something in stilted English and read it out!

The King’s English, published in 1901, told aspiring writers to be ‘direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid’. This trend has more or less continued. Strunk and White’s “The Elements of Style” that all writers refer to also advocates simplicity and clarity of thought in writing. We are asked to “omit needless words” and “avoid a succession of loose sentences”. In the chapter on style, Strunk and White advises us to write in a way that comes naturally to us and use words and phrases that come readily to hand.

But it’s a particularly Indian trait to equate “impressive” English with incomprehensible English. We use high-sounding words, words that are archaic, stilted, and no longer in vogue just to sound educated and prove that we are intellectual.

However, with globalization of the economy and outsourcing, we are now trying to embrace American English. Americans are known for their informal, direct and casual communication.

While writing marketing collateral, we’ve been trained to be direct and pragmatic, and to omit “marketing fluff” or jargon. We are encouraged to stick to what’s familiar, speaking in the reader’s own language. Direct, clear writing that is refreshing in its simplicity is the need of the hour. Even the client endorsements we provide in our collateral need to sound genuine, like someone would have actually said them; not something they were persuaded to come up with for the sake of it.

Bucknor: (n) (adj)
1. Temporary blindness leading to missing out on the obvious.
2. To be at the wrong place at the wrong time.
3. Situations leading to grave judgmental errors.
Usage: I feel bucknored by my boss;  Life often throws a bucknor at you.

Benson: (n) (adj)
1. Something that legitimises a severe bucknor.
Usage: First they bucknored me and then they bensoned it! I am toast.
Also see bucknor

It doesn’t take much to improve the quality of most business writing. Just muttering “shorter, clearer, stronger” in each editor’s ear twice a day will take you a surprisingly long way.

This down-to-earth “how-to” guide for editors and writers will take you a long way in the right direction.

1. Know who your readers are.
   Consumers or businesses, sales or engineering, office-based or customer-facing — who are these people you’re talking to?
   
2. Think about how long they’ve got.
   If they’re looking for quick bullet points, don’t swamp them with pages of prose.
   
3. Vary the words you use.
   If you have things you must say more than once, change the wording or turn the sentence round.
   
4. Weed out your spare adjectives.
   Try removing all purely descriptive words. Put them back one at a time, but only on merit.
   
5. Choose vigorous, vivid verbs.
   It’s the words of movement and action that pack life and energy into your writing.
   
6. Be active, not passive.
   “People write letters” is clearer, shorter and stronger than “Letters are written by people.”
   
7. Shorten your sentences.
   The full stop or full point is the most powerful stylistic tool in English. Use it. Often.
   
8. Break it up and lose the grey.
   Use headings, paragraphs and bulleted lists to let light into the text. Give people headlines they can scan.
   
9. Stick to your house style.
   “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Emerson. Have as few rules as possible, but enforce them.
   
10. Keep a dictionary within reach.
    Use it several times a day and try to develop a nose for words you might get wrong.

Source: http://www.e-editor.co.uk/

Here’s an e-mail I received, which provides useful tips while interacting with American clients.

1.Do not write “the same” in an email – it makes little sense to them.
   Example – I will try to organize the project artifacts and inform you of the same when it is done.
   This is somewhat an Indian construct. It is better written simply as:
   I will try to organize the project artifacts and inform you when that is done 2. Do not write or say, “I have some doubts on this issue”
      The term “Doubt” is used in the sense of doubting someone – we use this term because in Indian languages, the word for a “doubt”        
   and a “question” is the same.
      The correct usage (for clients) is:
      I have a few questions on this issue3. The term “regard” is not used much in American English. They usually do not say “regarding this issue” or “with regard to this”.
      Simply use, “about this issue”.

      “Can’t”       or       “Don’t” . Use the expanded “Cannot” or “Do not”.6.       Do not use the term “screwed up” liberally. If a situation is not good, it is better to say, “The situation is messed up”. Do not use words such as “shucks”, or “pissed off”. 7.        

As a general matter of form, Indians interrupt each other constantly in meetings – DO NOT interrupt a client when they are speaking .
        Over the phone, there could be delays – but wait for a short time before responding.8.       When explaining some complex issue, stop occasionally and ask “Does that make sense?“. This is preferable than “Do you understand me?”

9.       In email communications, use proper punctuation. To explain something, without breaking your flow, use semicolons, hyphens or
       paranthesis. As an example:
      You have entered a new bug (the popup not showing up) in the defect tracking system; we could not reproduce it – although,
      a screenshot would help.
      Notice that a reference to the actual bug is added in paranthesis so that the sentence flow is not broken. Break a long sentence
      using such punctuation.10.     In American English, a mail is a posted letter. An email is electronic mail.
   When you say “I mailed the information to you”, it means you sent an actual letter or package through the postal system.
   The correct usage is: “I emailed the information to you”11.     To “prepone” an appointment is an Indian usage. There is no actual word called prepone . You can “advance” an appointment.

   “End of Month” or “End of Day”. 14.     Americans have weird conventions for time – when they say the time is “Quarter Of One”, they mean the time is 1:15. Better to ask them the exact time.

15.     Indians commonly use the terms “Today Evening”, “Today Night”. These are not correct; “Today” means “This Day” where the Day stands
   for Daytime. Therefore “Today Night” is confusing. The correct usages are: “This Evening”, “Tonight”.
   That applies for “Yesterday Night” and “Yesterday Evening”. The correct usages are: “Last Night” and “Last Evening”. 16.     When Americans want to know the time, it is usual for them to say, “Do you have the time?“. Which makes no sense to an indian.

18.     When you talk with someone for the first time, refer to them as they refer to you – in America, the first conversation usually starts by
   using the first name. Therefore you can use the first name of a client. Do not say “Sir”. Do not call women “Madam”. 19.     It is usual convention in initial emails (particularly technical) to expand abbreviations, this way:
         We are planning to use the Java API for Registry (JAXR).
      After mentioning the expanded form once, subsequently you can use the abbreviation. 20.     Make sure you always have a subject in your emails and that the subject is relevant.

         Do not use a subject line such as HI.21.       Avoid using “Back” instead of “Back” Use “ago”. Back is the worst word for American. (for Days use “Ago”, for hours use “before”)

China has more English speakers than the United States .

The sentence “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog” uses every
letter in the english language. (Sentences containing every letter of the alphabet are called
“pangrams”, or “holalphabetic sentences”.)

“Bookkeeper” is the only word in English language with three consecutive
double letters.

Colgate faced a big obstacle marketing toothpaste in Spanish speaking
countries because Colgate translates into the command “go hang
yourself.”

“I am.” is the shortest complete sentence in the English language.

Here’s a popular forwarded message doing the rounds:

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as “Euro-English”.

In the first year, “s” will replace the soft “c”. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard “c” will be dropped in favour of “k”. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome “ph” will be replaced with “f”. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent “e” in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as
replasing “th” with “z” and “w” with “v”.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary “o” kan be dropd from vords kontaining “ou” and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

Here’s an article about how the hyphen is being dropped from most words these days…officially.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/7004661.stm

Etymology is the reason there are so many silent letters in English spelling. Etymology is the study of the history of words, and there was a widespread view that words should show their history in the way they are spelled. There was a genuine belief that it would help people if they could ’see’ the original Latin in a latin-derived English word.

So someone added a ‘b’ to the word spelled ‘det’, ‘dett’, or ‘dette’ in Middle English because the source in Latin was ‘debitum’. It thus became debt and caught on. Similarly, an ‘o’ was added to ‘peple’, because it came from’populum’. We find both ‘poeple’ and ‘people’, before the latter became the norm. An ’s’ was addedto ‘ile’ and ‘iland’ because of the Latin ‘insula’. Now we have ‘island’. There are many more such cases. Some people nowadays find it hard to understand why there are so many ’silent letters’ of this kind in English. It is because other people thought they were helping.

A series of changes affecting the long vowels of English, known as the Great Vowel Shift, took place in the early 1400s. Before the shift, a word like loud would have been pronounced ‘lood’, name as ‘nahm’, leaf as ‘layf’, mice as ‘mees’. Although the shift had no clear beginning or end, the majority of the changes took place within two generations. Grandparents and grandchildren in 1450 probably had considerable difficulty understanding each other.

Here’s a list of 100 most mispronounced words:

http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/mispron.html