Second Languages
I was on a tour bus in New York City recently while hosting my wife’s 13-year old niece, Ilayda, who’s visiting from Turkey for the summer.
The people on the bus, as one would expect on a tour bus in New York City, were from other countries and didn’t speak English as their first language, if they spoke it at all. Ilayda, for instance, is just learning English, has a vocabulary of a couple of hundred words and can make herself understood, but is only just learning the language.
I was therefore somewhat surprised by the wording the tour guide used when he explained the need for people to be quiet. He could have simply said, “Please be quiet.” Or he could have stated this very simply with, “No noise please.” Probably the most effective way to convey what he wanted would have been to put a finger to his lips and said, “Shhhhhh.”
Instead, the tour guide said,
“If you must converse while we’re meandering through the city, please keep your conversations as brief as possible and to a minimal roar.”
Now I ask you, even for those who have a basic understand of English, what do you suppose the chances are that they’d be able to understand this person’s request?
No doubt you’ll already be making the connection to proposal content. The job of a proposal is not to impress the reviewers/evaluators with our fancy vocabulary and language abilities. It’s to state the information in a clearly and in a way that is easy to understand. As you’ve heard us say many, many times, “Keep it simple.”
This article was written by BJ and filed under Word play & writing. If you found it useful, you can with others. To receive automatic updates, subscribe to The Proposal Guys via 
RSS or 
Email.
2 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL
Don’t get me started! We have a senior VP (and SME) that writes the most incomprehensible memos. Here is an example I took from a memo she sent as I was reading your post:
“Most recently, we created a model for introducing RAS as being an opportunity to build further upon.”
[...] the same trip to New York City that I mention in my last post, I went up to the Observatory deck of the Empire State Building. I’m originally from NY and have [...]