September 26, 2022

I used to work at a big hospital in a Middle Eastern country that employed healthcare professionals from all over the world. Even though English was the primary language spoken in the facility, I had a few colleagues who were better conversationalists in their native language. Whenever they needed to send a professional email to someone higher up in the chain of command, they would ask me to write it for them. They were confident in their ability to speak English, but didn’t want to take the risk of making a bad impression with their email.

It all started when my supervisor abruptly left her job and my coworker from Portugal was appointed the interim supervisor. He knew that he needed to start communicating more frequently with upper management, but wasn’t confident in his writing skills—particularly writing in English. He asked me to help him write his emails and I obliged. Most often, he’d attempt a rough draft of what he wanted to say and then asked me to sit down at his computer to review it. He pretty much gave me free reign to change whatever I wanted.

After that, word got around and I started getting requests from other coworkers who spoke English as a second language.

The way I saw it, writing emails for my coworkers was a way to help them out and make sure that they sounded as professional as possible in the business context we were in.

That being said, it wasn’t always easy. Every person had their own way of communicating, and it was up to me to try and capture that in writing. But it was always worth it in the end when I would see the look of relief on their face after finally sending out that email. And fortunately, I’m a very fast typer, so it didn’t take me a huge amount of time to help my colleagues.

This experience helped me to not take my English language skills for granted, which is sometimes easy to do when you’re born and raised in an English-speaking country like the United States. Whether we like it or not, English tends to be the language of business around the world. That can put pressure on those who don’t have English as their first language.

It was a pleasure writing these emails for my colleagues. I’d worked with them for many years and knew them very well, and didn’t want their struggle of writing professional-sounding emails in English to be a barrier to them demonstrating their good work.

Those experiences are the basis of what I do here at English Outsourced. I help businesses and business owners based in India transform the written English content in their businesses to make it sound as if it were written by a native speaker so that they can make the best impression possible with clients and colleagues. For more information on my services, click here.