Keeping records

Keeping records probably isn’t a new concept for you. You probably have files on your computer which have a record of correspondence with suppliers, clients, contacts, prospects, etc. You can probably get a statement from your bank showing records of your expenditure. Your telephone bill shows you who you called and when, how long the call was and the cost. Sometimes, we use these records to make changes, to reduce the costs, to improve systems or simply to remember what happened. So, are you keeping records of your English?

Sometimes, people tell me that they know they need to improve their English but they are not sure where to start. I usually recommend that they plan their next conversation, meeting...

A rhetorical question

I was recently asked a question which should have been rhetorical but it wasn’t. ‘Have I improved?’
We stopped training in April and it’s now the middle of August. There’s been lots of practice in the sense of work done and conversations held in English. However, the preparation and training have not been done beforehand. This is like playing the same tune on the piano again and again and hitting the same wrong note again and again. If you don’t know that the note is wrong how can you hope to play better next time?
If I buy a piano tomorrow and I sit at that piano and try to play music, it’s unlikely that I will get better...

What's next?

If you want to improve your English then I have one main suggestion for you. You should think about the next conversation that you want to have, the next email you want to send or the next presentation that you want to make in English and work on that first. Don’t make the mistake of delaying the conversation until you feel ready. That will just start a cycle of delaying the preparation and delaying the conversation with the result that you will never feel ready. Think about who you want to talk to and what you want to say. What are the likely or possible responses that you must be ready to hear, understand and respond to? What might...

What do you mean?

I have this strange idea that life would be better for many of us if we were able to communicate more effectively. Indeed, much of my work as a Business English trainer goes far beyond the normal boundaries of a language course and enters the precarious territory of communication, and why not? After all, the language is just the medium used for verbal and written communication and even people who share the same native language can be heard asking ‘What do you mean?’, or saying, ‘I don’t understand.’ So, is it a hopeless cause? Am I wasting my time? I don’t believe so.

I’ve just read an article posted in the Harvard Business Review about communication between departments in a...