How to write clearly for second language readers

Writing clearly for someone reading in their second language is mostly a job of removing idioms and phrasal verbs, plus the hedging that buries your ask. Smaller words help far less than people think. Vocabulary is almost never the thing that breaks.

The colleague who cannot follow "let's circle back on this and see if we can get it over the line" reads dense technical documentation all day without blinking. She knows the word "invoice". She does not know why your ball is in her court.

Most advice on this aims at the wrong layer. It says shorten your words, which sounds respectful and changes little, while the sentence underneath stays full of figures of speech that only make sense if you grew up inside them. The advice I like least says nothing needs to change at all, because everyone speaks English fine now. That is a way of moving work off your desk onto someone else's.

What actually trips people up

The hard parts of workplace English are the parts that are not literal, plus the parts where you avoided saying what you meant.

• Idioms fall apart the moment someone translates them word by word.
• Phrasal verbs change meaning completely depending on the small word attached.
• Sarcasm reads as a plain statement, so your joke arrives as a fact.
• Words like "it" and "this" at the start of a sentence leave the reader guessing which noun you meant.
• Heavy hedging hides whether you asked for something or were thinking out loud.

None of that is about vocabulary. All of it also confuses native readers who are tired or reading on a phone, which is why this pass improves everything you send.

Cut the idioms before you cut the words

Idioms are the biggest single source of confusion in work writing and the cheapest thing to remove.

Sports metaphors are the worst offenders, because a whole generation of office English was built on games most of the planet has never watched. Out of left field. A curveball. Moving the goalposts. Touching base. If the reader has to picture a diamond to understand your project update, you have written a riddle.

The replacements cost you nothing. "Let's park that" becomes "let's decide this later", which costs you eight characters and cannot be misread. "Ballpark" becomes "rough estimate". "Run it up the flagpole" becomes "ask the team", and honestly, everyone reading is relieved.

You do not have to write like an instruction manual. Warmth lives in the framing around the request. It has never lived in your flagpole.

Phrasal verbs are the quiet trap

Phrasal verbs are the confusion you never find out you caused, because each word is easy and the pair is not.

• "Put off the review" means delay the review, so write delay.
• "Call off", "call out" and "call on" look like siblings and share no meaning at all.
• "Get back to me" can mean reply or revisit, so name the one you want.
• "Hold off" reads as hold, which is roughly the opposite of stop.
• "Sort out" is fine in chat and far too vague inside a decision.

Nobody will ask you which meaning you intended. That is the part people miss. A reader who is already spending effort on your message will pick the likeliest reading and move on, and you find out a day later that the likeliest reading was wrong.

Put the ask in one sentence on its own line

An ask survives translation when it is one sentence, alone on a line, with a verb and a date in it.

Hedging is what destroys this. "Do you think you might be able to have a look at this at some point before Thursday if you get a chance?" contains a request, buried under four layers of politeness, and every layer is a place where meaning can leak out. The reader who is working in a second language now has to decide whether you asked for something or floated an idea.

Write "Please review the draft and reply by Thursday." Put the softness in the line before it, where it can do no damage. This is the same discipline that makes asking for a decision work at all, and second language readers just feel the failure earlier than everyone else.

Two structures deserve special suspicion. Negative questions ("You didn't send the file, did you?") get answered with a yes or a no that means opposite things depending on the language the reader thinks in. And "you might want to update the doc" is a firm instruction in some offices and an idle suggestion in others, which is a coin flip you are asking someone else to call.

Jokes are the most expensive thing in the message

Sarcasm is the single most costly item you can put in a message that crosses a language line, because it means the exact reverse of what it says.

"Great, another spreadsheet" lands as enthusiasm for one reader and contempt for another, and you have no way to know which one you got. Wordplay and references to shows and memes fail the same way, silently. Nobody replies asking what you meant by that. They form a slightly wrong impression of you and carry on with their day.

I still joke in chat, constantly. I keep it out of any message carrying a decision or a deadline. Those deserve to be boring.

Say nothing about anyone's English

The kindest thing you can do about a colleague's English is leave it alone.

Praise is not neutral here. "Your English is really good" marks the other person as a guest in the conversation, and it is usually said to someone who has been working in this language for longer than you have been at the company. Corrections in a work thread do the same thing with less charm.

If a sentence is genuinely ambiguous, ask about the content: "Do you mean the March invoice or the April one?" That is what you would ask anyone. It fixes the actual problem and leaves the person's dignity where it was.

Worth remembering: phrasings that sound odd to you are often completely standard somewhere else. Indian English is English. Nigerian English is English. American English is not the neutral version of the language, it is the loudest one in your inbox.

The pass that catches most of it

One reread aimed only at translation will catch nearly everything, and it takes well under a minute.

• Hunt for any phrase you could not explain literally to a ten year old, and replace it.
• Replace every "it" and "this" that opens a sentence with the actual noun.
• Check that the ask is one sentence and still makes sense read alone.
• Spell the month out, because 03/04 is two different days depending on where the reader lives.
• Read the whole thing flat, with no tone in your head, and see whether it still says what you meant.

Mine fail this badly. I write in idiom by default, so half of what I mean turns up wrapped in a metaphor about boats or fields, and I never notice until somebody answers a question I did not ask. Pulling the plain rewrite out of Unvent in the box is the cheapest way I have found to send the request without the scenery.

The clearest writer in your thread

Some of the clearest work messages I have ever received were written by people working in their second language.

There is a reason for that. When every word costs a moment of thought, you stop spending words on nothing. No filler, no throat clearing before the point. Just the thing, said once.

Meanwhile the rest of us write fast and make the reader carry the difference. That reader is doing a second job inside your message, translating while also doing the actual work of understanding what you want, and none of that effort shows up anywhere you can see it.

Take the minute. The native speaker reading on a phone in the back of a taxi gets a better message too, and he was never really following your flagpole either.