Bunglings in Business English

Tan Shiow Chin wrote this interesting article,"Blunders in Business English" in the SUNDAY STAR today.
In this write-up she wrote about British Council Malaysia Professional Development Unit (PDU) trainer Alex Cummins and his advice in the field of business English.

My comments will be in parentheses.

Let us read her news article.

" Enclosed herewith”, “for your kind perusal”, “revert to”, “the above matter refers”, “furnish me with details” — have you ever used one or more of these phrases in your writing?

If you have, then you run the risk of sounding pompous and old-fashioned, says British Council Malaysia Professional Development Unit (PDU) trainer Alex Cummins. He said that some of the phrases are overly-formal and are hardly used outside Malaysia.

“Some of the phrases are old-fashioned. It is not to say that they are wrong, but if you go outside of Malaysia, they are not really used,” he said.

He added that while business communication should be about breaking down barriers. Using such phrases actually creates a distance between the sender and the recipient of the communique because of their extreme formality,he added.

Cummins was sharing the common errors Malaysians tend to make in business English based on his three years of experience training for the PDU in Malaysia.

During his presentation at the launch of the PDU 2010 public workshops series in Kuala Lumpur recently, the trainer opined that while Malaysians are great linguists and generally fluent in English, it is the little errors that stand out, particularly from a business point of view.[What does he have in mind? what modern Simple English phrase are good substitutes].

“It is the errors in small things that have become so fossilised that they are almost looked at as not wrong,” he said. [As long as the current bosses are trained in the 1960s, this terms will still be current and acceptable].

An example he gave was the common mistake of using “staffs”, “informations” and “advices”. [These are grammar errors. A non issue here].

As the words “staff”, “information” and “advice” are single uncountable nouns, they already imply the plural, and need not have an “-s” added to them.

“These are some of the most common errors we come across in e-mail writing,” Cummins shared.
Another area he touched on was that of pronunciation.

While he does not expect non-native English speakers to have perfect pronunciation, he said: “There are four areas I feel that often really affect listeners’ ability to understand what the person is saying.”

“They are long and short vowel sounds, consonant clusters, word stress and sentence stress.”

Cummins pointed out that the pronunciations of “man” and “men” are particularly troublesome for Malaysians.
“Our workshops can teach you how to use the phonetic chart in the dictionary, so that you can look up how to pronounce the words yourself, rather than having to keep referring to a teacher,” he said.

Meanwhile, he shared that words with consonant clusters — like “crisps”, “grasp” and “glimpsed” — are difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce, as most other languages do not have such clusters.

As for word stress, Cummins gave examples of words like “purchase” and “career”, where Malaysians tend to put the stress on the second syllable (eg “-chase”), rather than the first (eg “pur-”), which is correct.[Do take note of this].

Native Malay speakers also tend to sound very monotonous and flat while speaking English because of the difference sentence stresses in both languages. This particularly affects business presentations.[Yes, it is happening among the younger set of managers].

“Malay is syllable-timed with the sentence stress coming regularly (based on the number of syllables), while in English, it is stress-timed and the stress is on the content words,” he explained.

Earlier in the event, PDU director Jamie Mann shared that his unit provides corporate training to organisations and interested individuals in Malaysia.[Yes, and pay a bomb!]

“We believe our main strength is our training team."

“All our trainers come from a training background, and some have an English teaching background.
“They’ve also worked in a number of countries and have experience adapting content to the local context,” he told the audience in his speech.

The unit provides three types of training: soft skills workshops, customised business English courses, and business communication skills courses.

This year, the unit will be conducting over 70 one- or two-day courses in both Kuala Lumpur and Penang, based on about 30 themes.

“We try to make it a fun experience, as the more memorable the training is, the easier it is to remember what you learnt and put it into practice once you are back at work,” Mann said.

He added that the material for the workshops was specially developed for the Malaysian context.

“We’ve been working for a few years to fine-tune the material for Malaysian English speakers,” he said, while adding that the workshops were also suitable for native speakers.[Yes, it does take time,doesn't it?"]