ESL Business Writing Editing and Proofreading Services

Someone writes to a colleague in another office to ask for a figure before Thursday. The email opens with two warm paragraphs, moves through the background of the project, and reaches the request in the fifth sentence, where it appears as a hope that the data might be available at some point. Thursday passes and nothing arrives. The colleague had read a friendly update and filed it. The request had in fact been made, in the register that would have carried it in the writer's first language, where obligation is signalled by elaboration — and English routes obligation through an entirely different set of words.

We edit the business writing of people working in English as an additional language — internal and external emails, memos and briefing notes, reports and summaries, proposals and tender responses, meeting minutes and action lists, performance reviews and self-assessments, process and policy documentation, and the replies to clients and customers that carry a company's manner in a few lines.

Where the ask sits is what determines whether a business email produces an action or a nod, and its failure is courtesy expressed as elaboration in a language that expresses it in modal verbs. We work through these so the request and its date appear within the first three lines, since a reader moving through fifty messages decides in seconds whether one requires anything of them and files everything that does not; so the courtesy is carried by the modal — could you, would you be able to, I would be grateful if you could — rather than by length, because English puts deference into the grammar of the request itself and reads extra sentences around it as doubt about whether the request is justified; so one message carries one ask, given that an email containing three requests is commonly answered on the easiest of them and the other two are not refused but simply never addressed; so the subject line names the action and the date rather than the topic, since a subject that names a topic gets filed and a subject that names an action gets scheduled; and so the direct forms your first language uses for an ordinary instruction are re-pitched rather than carried across word for word, given that a phrasing which is entirely neutral in one language can arrive in English as a brusqueness the writer never intended and would not recognise as their own. Messages edited this way get answered.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including internal documents, commercial figures and personnel matters. We are editors rather than managers, HR advisers or business consultants, and we offer no view on the decision you are communicating, the relationship behind it or how a situation should be handled. What we can do is make sure your request reads as the request you meant to make.