Smartass English

Let me sincerely congratulate everyone who survived 2021 and entered 2022 in one piece, being of sound mind and spirit. That’s already an achievement all right.

The last two years have deprived us of big dreams and bold aspirations. Many of us have reduced ourselves to survivors, and rightfully so: with such a short planning horizon and ever changing circumstances all many of us, me included, could afford was getting by.

Although I had to freeze the blog for several months for personal and profesional reasons, Smartass English is not done, and I’ve got some fun plans for 2022. What I have in mind for you is challenging, and maybe the last thing you want right now is another challenge, but Smartass English has never been basic, has it?

I know that you, my people, if you’re still here, you’ll support me by being open to new ways and experiments and by learning from what I’m sharing. And I’ll support you by teaching you what I know and encouraging you to leave (God forgive me) your comfort zone 😃

And thus we’ll survive 2022, and whatever the year that’ll follow, and we’ll live happily ever after.
Amen, and awoman.

😤Who cares whether you call your boss a “annoying incompetent slug” or an “incompetent annoying slug”? Well, English grammarians, for one thing, but I don’t think you really care much about their opinions.

🤷🏻‍♀️Really, what does it matter? It’s pretty clear both ways.

🐤I won’t get tired of revisiting the same old truth about communication: the more inaccuracies there are in our speech, the more distorted the message becomes. Every error is a rock against which our listener stumbles. It wears them off faster, they lose their focus.
They have to think more about what we actually meant to say, and less on the content of the message.

🙉“Enough with this communication nonsense, just tell us already what the rules are!”

📛OK, things are complicated here. Rules are pretty generic and are supposed to be intuitive (no s**t!). But here they are.

⚠️Rule 1. Opinion before facts
Back to the annoying incompetent boss, in this and ONLY this order. Although both words are sort of subjective, “annoying” is much more so. No one is objectively annoying, it depends on the person who’s giving the assessment; however, one can be objectively incompetent. So here you are.

⚠️Rule 2. General ideas before specific ideas
Remember the case from the stories that started all this adjective order frenzy? “Polish summer courses” from a banner ad. It’s not right because “summer” is much more general: “Polish course” is much more specific than “Summer course”. The more specific word must be closer to the noun.

🔍Think about it this way: almost no one would google “summer courses”, but a lot of people (well, maybe not so many in fact) will google “Polish courses”. So the characteristic “Polish” is more important.

⚠️Rule 3. And here is the formal rule from a grammar book. This is how you place your adjectives, and don’t you dare to do it otherwise!

Opinion
size
other qualities
age
colour/pattern
nationality
material

THOSE WORDS ARE BANNED IN MY WORKPLACE. WHY???

🤬Today my team-mates have shared with me a so-called “Dictionary of Deprecated Terminology”. I’ve been on the team for 4 months, but better late than never, I guess.

🌎The company we’re working for is a huge American enterprise, and they care A LOT about their public image and inclusion. Like, for example, they ran a major meeting where all the presenters were LGBTQ+ AND middle or top management talking about how amazing they feel being a part of the company.

😛It affects the language, of course. It turns out, there’s a number of tech-terms that are considered offensive and should be avoided. Here’s this list, lo and behold!

-Master/Slave
-Blacklist/Whitelist
-Blackbox/Whitebox
-Master Repo branch
-Grooming
-Grandfathering
-Brown bag

🙈(Don’t the last two look like the names of some especially dirty s*x practices??)

👧🏾In fact, all of them apart from Grooming have to do with racism, the Black history of the US and people fighting for their rights. “Grooming” as in “Backlog grooming”, as it appears, is a term associated with digital child luring, and recently it’s been widely replaced with “Refinement”.

👍🏻On the whole, I fully support such initiatives, because language does shape our reality, there’s no doubt in it. I also like the fact that those are recommendations, not requirements.

😫My main problem with this list is the replacements: for every undesired word a whole list of options is suggested, which makes communication a little confusing. For example, instead of “Slave” we’re offered:
-Worker
-Client
-Agent
-Follow
-Secondary
-Replica

😱To me as a non-technical person that’s really confusing, because at the company people really use all of those words interchangeably, and it’s sometimes pretty hard to follow.

🤭Hopefully, it’s a matter of time when the vocabulary becomes standardised, and while we’re waiting, I’ve submitted my request to put the gender-neutral pronoun “they” for process description on the list ;)

😎BOAST AWAY! HOW TO SPEAK ABOUT YOUR PROFESSIONAL ACHIEVEMENTS

🤫Whether you were taught that good girls, boys and other s*xes shouldn’t boast, is irrelevant if you want a career. Unless you speak out about your achievements, they’ll be overlooked.

📌So here are some ground rules:

- being modest about your achievements takes you nowhere
- people don’t think you’re a jerk if you’re proud of your success
- you’re the best judge of your success

📎Whether it’s a job interview or a performance review or any other appropriate occasion to show off a little, here are some tips. Give me a ❤️, and read on to learn HOW to speak about your achievements.

✅USE PRESENT PERFECT

Unless you’re specifying WHEN you hit your goal, Present Perfect is a better choice than Past Simple.

✅USE CLAUSES OF RESULT

It’ll always score you some more points if you explain what effect your achievement had on the team, company, business etc.
Linkers you can use are:
- So
- So that
- As a result
- Consequently
- For that reason
- Thus

✅USE ADJECTIVES

Subjective opinion is perfectly fine when you speak of your success. Boldly use the words like:
- Impressive
- Great
- Smart
- Major
- Considerable

❗️Maybe though “brilliant”, “outstanding” or “genius” could be reserved for your peers and clients.

✅USE DISTANCING

If you’re still worried you may sound too pretentious or boastful, use the following phrases to emphasise you’re not claiming to state facts, just opinions and observations.

- I think / believe / suppose / reckon
- It seems (as though)
- Likely / unlikely
- May / might / could + perfect infitnitive

😛Now, I seem to have done some fu***ng awesome job preparing the list of tips and examples (in the gallery➡️➡️➡️) for you so that you could save them and use in your next PR or Job Interview. Don’t forget to give me a ❤️

5️⃣ ADVANCED PHRASAL VERBS FOR MEETINGS

📚A little vocabulary for this sweet summer evening. ♥️like and save the post to use in the nearest business meeting ;)

❓What are your favourite phrasal verbs you use in meetings? Share in the comments 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻!

🔷Run smth by smn

Communicate a message to a superviser or another accountable stakeholder in order to get an approval or opinion.

🔷Bring up

Raise a question or a topic.

🔷Come up

To be mentioned or talked about in a conversation.

🔷Speak up

Speak in a louder voice

🔷Loop smn in

Keep smn informed of what’s happening, often by including her/him in the mailing list.

Sample sentences in the gallery! ➡️➡️➡️

🎉Happy anniversary to my other baby .english and kudos to all of my loyal and trusting followers!

📚This has been an amazing year of new discoveries and great encounters. I’ve met so many smart and ambitious people who motivated me to move forward!

🕰I’ve taught dozens of hours of English lessons and finally ended up finding MY audience, who I really enjoy working with

🤓I’ve boosted my English and my confidence to an unprecedented level. I still have got so much to learn though...

💩And I’ve had some serious lows and disappointing failures like courses that never went live or marketing strategies that never worked.

👩🏻‍💼Although I’ve just landed a new job and I’m trying on a new role, I’m commited to this little endeavour, and I betcha we’ll have a lot of fun together! New ideas I’ve got plenty of, and with your support I’m positive I’ll make (some of) them work!

Thank you, my darlings! And stay tuned 🤗

❌🦉HOW TO REJECT INVITATIONS FOR LATE NIGHT MEETINGS

😬One of my biggest pains in the ass since I started working as a Product Owner (PO) on a project whose stakeholders are mostly based on the West Coast is unexpected invitations to critical, urgent, ASAP major priority late night calls 🔥🍑

(♥️Give me a like of support if you share my pain!)

🔕Don’t get me wrong, an occasional late night call, planned and consensual, is fine by me. Especially if I get to submit a double-paid overtime request for it ;) 💵

🕯But in my case such invites have rapidly become:
▪️regular (3-4 times a week);
▪️with a short notice (2 hours before the meeting at best);
▪️all of them are “super important” and have no agenda.

🙅🏻‍♀️Attending off-hour meetings regularly in case it wasn’t originally a job requirement is harmful not only for you, but for the team you’re representing as well.

👎🏻Your work-life balance goes down the drain.
👎🏻If you think someone appreciates your dedication, you’re wrong. It’s just taken for granted.
👎🏻You can’t quit going to those night meetings once you start: you set expectations and you’ll need to work hard to painlessly change them.
👎🏻Those expectations affect your team as well: if you can jump on a call at 9 pm, why can’t they?
👎🏻You may make people who don’t go to those meetings look and feel less hard-working.

❓How to politely reject such meeting invitations? Swipe through the gallery for language tips, and bookmark the post in case you need it! ➡️➡️➡️

🧏🏻‍♀️FIRST SENTENCE DOESN’T MATTER AS LONG AS THE CONTENT IS GOOD

Or does it?

9 times out of 10 Eastern / Central European speakers would open a presentation or an article with some terrible, tedious generalisation like:

🥱🥱🥱 The modern world is rapidly changing every day, bringing new levels of complexity and new challenges. This means both customers and retailers are continually making adjustments to their behaviors to meet changing desires, expectations, and environments.

🙊You most likely have no clue what the article could be about, and, what’s worse, no incentive to go on reading. And that’s bad for the writer.

💻The problem is, we as information consumers have become extremely picky: we’ve got access to unlimited information and very limited time, so it takes us a couple of sentences to decide whether to invest any effort in further reading or not.

🧑🏼‍🏫Many of us were taught from school to begin an essay or presentation with a generalisation in order to convince the reader that we’re about to tell them something extremely important.

💃🏻The western approach to opening has proven more successful in catching the reader's attention. There would be three main strategies to follow. In the first 2 sentences you could:

🔻Summarize your article / presentation
🔻Outline the problem
🔻Use a “hook”: an interesting case or situation

👍🏻Or a combination of those.

✔️Such approach helps the reader / listener to decide if it’s something interesting for them and tune in.

🔝If you recognize your style of opening, here’s a tip: write the opening after you’re done with the rest of your materials and know exactly what’s your message to your audience. Don’t let banalities repel tour reader!

➡️➡️➡️ Read the presentation openings in the gallery and write in the comments the number(s) of those which’ll make the audience yawn and reach for their phones after 30 seconds!

5️⃣ TRICKS TO SOUND LESS DIRECT

⚠️ Russian and Polish native speakers come across as rather blunt to people from cultures where directness is less of a virtue. In business being too direct may cause unintended offence, or even ruin business prospects.

❎I’m certainly not suggesting you get rid of this habit altogether: directness can be really refreshing in the world of polite understatement. But being able to adjust how direct you are by using specific language means could be really helpful.

Agreed? Then give me a ❤️, save the post and enjoy the top tools to sound less direct.

1️⃣ MODIFIERS: somewhat, in a way, a little, a bit (of a), slightly etc. Used to downgrade the sharpness of negative adjectives / nouns.

👉🏻The last software update was a little buggy.

2️⃣ PASSIVE VOICE or THERE IS/ARE: both tools are used to avoid pointing fingers or causing people to feel guilty for unwanted results or situations.

👉🏻The March sales forecast hasn't been calculated accurately.

3️⃣ MODAL VERBS: may, could, might. Used to give statements in an indicative mood a shadow of a doubt.

👉🏻Such an approach may be risky.

4️⃣ QUESTIONS: a nice way to indicate mistakes, inaccuracies, dubious decisions, give instructions, request something. Pretty much, you can do anything!

👉🏻Would you mind sending your feature requests in advance?

5️⃣ NEGATIVE VERB + POSITIVE ADJECTIVE/NOUN: a way to soften feedback or rejection.

👉🏻This solution isn’t perfect. (Instead of “This solution is awful”)

➡️➡️➡️ For more smartass examples, check out the gallery, and let me know in the comments if you think you may sometimes be too direct with your colleagues 😃

✏️CAN WRITING IMPROVE YOUR SPEAKING?

📍Most of my students already CAN speak, but it’s a pretty basic talk on everyday work-related topics, the same phrases over and over again.

📈To expand your horizons having limited time, start journaling, possibly on work-related matters, 15-20 min a day. In order to improve your speaking, you must follow certain rules in your writing.

1️⃣Challenge yourself

💪🏻Writing, unlike speaking, gives you enough time to use a dictionary or Internet and find the most accurate words to express your meaning, use new grammar constructions, without being afraid of making a mistake or being misunderstood.

❌’Let’s schedule a meeting to discuss it’

✅‘Shall we jump on a call later today to drill that a little deeper?’

After you tried using new words and constructions in writing, you’ll feel more confident using them again, when speaking.

2️⃣Structure your discourse

🗂When getting down to journaling, decide what you want to say. Are you writing about an annoying colleague who keeps asking stupid questions? About improvements in the interviewing process you’d like to suggest?

Structure your thoughts in such a way that would ensure your reader’s complete and full understanding of what you’re trying to say. Get rid of unnecessary and distracting details.

👍🏻As soon as structuring your thoughts becomes a habit in writing, your spoken argumentation or narration will also improve.

3️⃣Read what you’ve written out loud.

🗣When you’re reading your text out loud, you can hear instantly what doesn’t sound right, which phrases are clumsy, which arguments don’t hold water, where the words are not chosen accurately. This will help you polish your wording when you speak. Let’s call such a reading method a ‘beta-version of speaking’.

🚀Ideally, for fast progress you need feedback. Students on my Business English Fluency course receive plenty of feedback on their strengths and improvement areas, and I can see how it helps them polish their speaking.

❤️A student’s written assignment in the gallery can give you an idea of what to strive for ;)

🙀THOSE 3 WORDS ARE BAD FOR YOUR PROFESSIONAL IMAGE.

✏️If you cross these words off your business vocabulary, you’ll be much better off. Give me a ❤️ for yet another piece of wisdom, and read on.

🚫UNPROFESSIONAL

Professionalism is a lot of things, and saying “unprofessional” means “you don’t correspond to one or several criteria that I consider the essence of professionalism”.

There’s no way you’ll have a constructive discussion once this word starts being tossed around. Its only purpose is to offend the person you refer to.

Use data points, describe the behaviour that you personally find unprofessional and explain how it affects business or you personally. Yes, that’s more words, but also 9000 times more sense.

🚫ASAP (as soon as possible)

ASAP again provides no data whatsoever except for the fact that you think you and your work are massively important, and there’s no time to explain why.

⏳Also if you use it but too often, and so many of your tasks are urgent, that probably means you’ve been neglecting them until they become urgent. Not perfect time management.

ASAP may mean anything from “within 10 minutes” to “till the end of the week” to “treat it as a high priority”. Most people who value their work time will follow up with a question “When?” to get a specific deadline, so why don’t you just say it from the beginning to save you both some breath? And if you give more context, the other person will probably be more willing to help, realising the urgency.

🚫UNFORTUNATELY

😠My top of the list of poor words choices is this guy. Let’s stop for a second to think about what it’s supposed to mean.

👉🏻”Unfortunately, the likes per post are down by 20%”, your marketing specialist tells you.

“Unfortunately” for whom? For her? That’s not good on many levels. She admits she’s got no control over the process and probably no idea how to improve that situation.

Or does she mean “unfortunately” for you? Then she’s basically setting you into a pessimistic mood on purpose, limiting your interpretation of what she says.

More examples ➡️➡️➡️.

Do you use any of those words? 😉