More thoughts about English as a second language

Think for a moment about the challenges of learning English as a second language.

Two basic issues – vocabulary and grammar – are challenges common to acquiring any foreign language.

Yes, English has a particularly rich cultural heritage supported by something over 200,000 words – each, on average, having about four different meanings (e.g., a “cast” as a noun, covers a broken leg; as a verb one can cast aspersions, cast a play or cast a fishing line).

English grammar can be stultifying – but probably no more dishearteningly irregular for a squirming third-grader than your run-of-the-mill Farsi dialect.

Spelling – ay, there’s the rub.

Through and through, it’s a thoroughly tough nut to crack; though burrowing through alternatives at a buck a throw might yield a pile of dough tall enough to drown skyscrapers in the borough of Manhattan ... but perhaps you’ve bought enough cough medicine and hiccough remedies to last until the next major drought.

Gaught it?

No, English is a particularly difficult challenge, even for the native speaker.  But a spark of empathy for non-English speakers stepping boldly onto the road to English fluency is in order.

Bottom line: When writing anything – anything at all – consider the prospects for confusion in your work.  Editor would lack paying customers should the English-speaking world suddenly grasp the difference between “principal” and “principle.”

Or learn that “accommodate” has two “m’s” in it.

Or that a “facility” is the shack in the back with the half moon carved into the door (you really can boggle people’s minds by referring to a 25,000-seat facility, when you’re really talking about a large basketball arena – why, back in West Virginny, a TWO-seater was considered quite a luxury).

If you do not write with precision and clarity, you will not be understood.

The general public has altogether too much to read already – too many books, too many sales brochures, quarterly reports, movie reviews and comic books – for you to expect them to decipher poorly conceived copy.

Best-selling novels are translated by professionals when they are to be marketed abroad.  No one expects some poor schmuck in Stockholm to translate a Danielle Steele potboiler on his own.

Don’t make your reader translate your badly spelled, poorly worded grammatic disaster.

Write it right – all of it, all right.  All right? 

Next: Slang-bashing – The Top 10 English language idioms

[For personal writing assistance, go to www.fixadocument.com]