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The thing is that writing professional email as a non-native sucks. I'm a non-native English speaker myself. My level is typically considered very good (C2 CEF
by Al-Khwarizmi 4y ago
The thing is that writing professional email as a non-native sucks.
I'm a non-native English speaker myself. My level is typically considered very good (C2 CEFR level, which is the highest measured level in the European framework). If I need to write an email to a colleague whom I know and trust, that's easy. Writing this message in HN? Also easy, I'm just improvising it as I think it, not much slower than I would in my natural language.
But writing an email to someone you don't know... that's very different. When you write in a non-native language, it's extremely easy to get the subtleties wrong: to sound too pushy about what you want, to make the matter seem more or less urgent than it really is, to sound too blunt or too polite... this doesn't matter with people you know or with strangers in an informal setting like this, but it does matter when emailing strangers in a professional setting, and it's extremely difficult to get right when you are non-native.
Sometimes I used to spend 15-20 minutes brooding over an email in this type of scenario, making and rethinking edits while hitting the submit button... not anymore. ChatGPT: "Write an email reminding this person, who has this role, that the deadline for thing X expires on day Y. The email should be polite, assertive but not too pushy". Check the output, maybe make some trivial edits, because the difficult part (the tone) tends to be fine, at least for my standards. Done.
Non-native speakers aren't going to renounce that luxury. It just makes too big of a difference to not use it in that case.
- tayo42 4y agofwiw im a native speaker of english and find corporate communication tough. there's nothing natural about it. corporate culture is just horrible overall
- warner25 4y agoI second this. It can take multiple man-hours among native speakers to craft an email in a politically-sensitive, high-stakes professional environment. I worked under an executive who would keep her people (inner-circle advisors, direct reports, etc.) huddled around her desk all day as she slowly wrote and rewrote email responses to her boss(es) and executive peers. I hated having to go to her office for things because it was so easy to get pulled into that circle and feel like there was no escape. I'm a native speaker who has attained near-perfect scores on the verbal sections of the SAT and GRE, and I like writing, but I'm still a very slow writer myself.
- asdff 4y agoI don't know about anyone else, but if I find myself in a job where I am fretting over each email I send, its time to find a different job.
- warner25 4y agoYou're not wrong. Fortunately, I was insulated from a lot of that climate, got what I needed from the job, and moved on. I definitely don't aspire to more senior levels of management, certainly not in this organization, after seeing that and other things.
- oska 4y agoYour level of expression in this comment is so high that using ChatGPT as a substitute in anything you write is going to be a serious downgrade. And it's the nature of a certain personality type to obsess over how they've expressed themselves (which can be both a positive and negative trait). That's just who you are and probably part of why you've attained such a high level, near-native mastery of English.
- asdff 4y agoFor what its worth, early career and in undergrad, I would worry about emailing too and probably spend too much time just being nervous about it. Then you get enough replies back from the big fish that are literally just "ok Sent from my iPhone." And then you start feeling more comfortable. Then before you know it, you are pounding out an email in 30 seconds and tolerating the occasional typo or forgotten attachment. I realized all the anxiety I had over emailing was entirely self imposed, frankly its never that serious. You are human after all just like everyone else.
- daemn 4y agoThe big fishes receive hundreds if not thousands of emails a day. However, for someone early in their career they might be judge for typos and missed attachments as not having enough attention to details or not meeting the standards.
- asdff 4y agoIf you are working in a place where such human errors get such an impact over your life, its probably time to find less toxic waters to tread in for work.