Journal of English for Special Purposes, 1999
User-Friendly Communication
Skills
in the Teaching and Learning
of Business English
Robert de Beaugrande
Abstract. This paper reports a pilot project in teaching and learning business English at the
University of Botswana, where English is the language of instruction and, for
most learners, a second language. The project was closely tailored to the
prevailing social and academic context as described from the standpoint of
discourse analysis; and was performed with authentic data samples taken
directly from that context. The encouraging results, as illustrated here with
student work, suggest that this approach could profitably be developed into a
regular course.
The Urgent Need for New
Initiatives
In their “international survey” of “business English,” Mary
Schleppegrell and Linda Royster (1990) reported the findings of on-site visits
by staff of the Centre for Applied Linguistics (Washington, D.C.) at 55 English
language training contractors in the Americas, Asia, Europe, and the Middle
East, being considered for business training by Arthur Andersen & Co. They
found “only 38% using business-oriented instructional materials”; “only 40%
offering courses with goals that were specifically relevant to business
professionals”; and only “47% incorporating business-oriented activities” and
“tasks similar to those encountered at work” (1990: 8-9). They concluded that
“there is an unmet need for high-quality business English programs in all the
areas,” and called for “the further development of business-oriented English
programs that use business-related materials and motivating work-related
activities” (1990: 14).
The situation may have improved in some places since then, but the
improvements have almost certainly been concentrated in specialised
institutions at the ‘Centre’, where the realisation that information and
communication are high-priced commodities has begun to be reflected in
instructional materials. In public institutions, notably here in the so-called
‘Periphery’, the situation I have found matches their report only too neatly.
Upon my arrival, I was assigned to a team teaching a first-year course
entitled “English Communication Skills for Students in Business” in the English
Department at the University of Botswana in Gaborone. For most of our learners,
English is a second language. The dominant home language, understood by some
90% of Botswana’s population, is Setswana, a Sotho language; a less common home
language is Sekalanga, a language from the Shona group which is dominant in
neighbouring Zimbabwe. Nonetheless, the levels of proficiency and fluency in
English are impressively high, as the student data presented further on will
attest. In the urban areas, English-medium schools are popular, as are English
mass media, especially television, which is currently re-re-re-running soaps
like Dynasty. But our learners have
had no prior training in business English, and are thrown quite unprepared into
technical courses like “Introduction to Accounting,” where I decided to
concentrate my own project.
I had no say in the choice of assigned textbooks for my the course, and
I was told these are the standard ones for courses in universities such as
ours; moreover, the books themselves assure the reader in their prefaces that
they are required by numerous British (then) ‘polytechnics’. I shall refer to
the textbooks only by letters (e.g. “ were singularly inappropriate. They were
all issues or re-issues dating back at least 15 years; and their approaches and
attitudes toward language date back a great deal farther, hardly differing from
those of William Strunk’s magisterial Elements
of Style from the year 1919.
I had no say in the choice of assigned textbooks for my the course, and
I was told these are the standard ones for courses in universities such as
ours; moreover, the books themselves assure the reader in their prefaces that
they are required by numerous British (then) ‘polytechnics’. I shall refer to
the textbooks only by letters (e.g. “Textbook A”) to avoid any reflections on
their presumed market value. They were all issues or re-issues dating back at
least 15 years; and their approaches and attitudes toward language date back a
great deal farther, hardly differing from those of William Strunk’s magisterial
Elements of Style from the year 1919.
Such textbooks assume that the primary need of the students is to be
advised in general English usage, with only occasional reference to business
matters. Textbook A (published in 1981) was a thick volume (406-page) packed
with the same traditional well-meaning but nebulous advice found in textbooks
for general English, such as: “choose those words which express just what you
mean”; “use adjectives and adverbs with their proper meanings” and “correctly”;
or “vague words are always useless” (A: 25, 20-21). The students are left to
glean what is actually meant by terms like “proper,” “correct,” or “vague” from
adventitious rosters of expressions the author counsels us simply not to use,
such as “terribly inconvenient,” “real problem,” “major disaster,” “unduly
prolonged,” “in connection with,” “with reference to,” “make the most of the
opportunity,” “enclosed please find,” “under separate cover,” or “forwarded”
(A: 21-23, 31, 79).
Evidently, the age-old prescriptive and proscriptive
attitudes toward grammar and usage in general English have been reapplied to
business English. Just as traditional grammarians like Strunk have believed
that the English language must be protected against the variations and
innovations of everyday speech, the author of Textbook A felt licensed to pass
judgement upon expressions that are in fact typical of actual usage in real
business English. Perhaps the general disinterest in “business-related materials”
reported by Schleppegrell and Royster is related to a deeper mistrust of
ordinary language as compared to careful academic prose.
Those old attitudes might be responsible for exercises in “finding the
mistakes” in invented samples like this one:
[1] The Chairman predicted
that this year would be the very best year for the Company since the boom year
of ten years’ ago. […] He hoped to thoroughly examine the situation. (Textbook
B: 62)
The roster
of “errors as the author sees them” included: “‘best’ is already a superlative,
therefore ‘very’ is unnecessary”; and “‘to thoroughly examine” is an
unacceptable split infinitive.” This captious diagnosis misleads students by
distracting their attention away from the issues that are genuinely relevant to
effective communication.
When the students are not ferreting out split infinitives and such
like, the book has them doing other “exercises” that again sound like some stodgy
general English textbook: “explain in detail which month of the year you prefer
and why”; “write an essay on when father papered the parlour”; “write a short
article on summer holidays”; “write an essay about a walk along the seashore”;
and, yes, “write an essay with the title ‘a woman’s place is in the home’” (A:
80-81, 93-97, 169). Such exercises seem not just patently irrelevant to
business communication, but intellectually patronising and culturally
inappropriate to Botswana, where both “wallpaper” and “parlours” are unknown,
the school “holiday” occurs in our winter, and the nearest “seashore” is over a
thousand kilometres away.
The Social and Academic Context of Business English
To produce realistic materials and relevant
exercises, the social and academic
context of business English needs to be carefully assessed. If, as I have
argued in some detail in a recent volume (Beaugrande 1997), the leading goal
for the theory and practice of a science of text and discourse should be to
promote the freedom of access to
knowledge and society through discourse, then I should seek ways of making both business
English and business discourse in English more freely accessible to my
students.
As in the other areas of my work, I felt that a strongly
bottom-up approach would be most productive. So my first task was clear: to
collect and examine authentic samples of the business English my students could
expect to encounter. As a practical measure, I identified three discourse
domains. Public discourse could
subsume those modes of communication whereby the business community represents
itself to society, as in the “business” section of a newspaper. Academic discourse could subsume those
modes of communication whereby students like ours are trained for future entry
into the world of business, as in a course textbook. Professional discourse could subsume the modes of communication
among real-life business personnel, as in a profit and loss account.
Ideally, these three domains would interact in straightforward ways.
Public discourse would accommodate wide audiences by striking a balance between
being accessible and being businesslike. Academic discourse would efficiently
and effectively prepare the learners for their entry into business professions.
And professional discourse would operate on a general and clear consensus about
the meaning and usage of technical terms, and about registers and text types.
But my samples from the first two domains, public and academic business
discourse, projected no such ideal picture. The more closely I examined actual
data, the more disturbed I felt about the extent to which the public discourse
was vague or obfuscatory, whilst the academic discourse was obtuse, verbose, or
patronising. Even special-purpose terms were used carelessly or inconsistently,
or were abruptly introduced without being defined or explained.
My prior studies of academic discourse in such areas as geometry and
psychology (e.g. Beaugrande 1991, 1994) have led me to surmise that such
problems are by no means limited to business education. Academic discourse at
large seems to persist in a linguistic and intellectual limbo where its
complicated intermediary role between the tasks of prospective learners and the
decorum of professional communication has not been properly assessed or
reflected (Bernstein 1994). My analyses indicated not merely that insiders such
as textbook authors and technical writers are not sufficiently sensitive to the
communicative needs and problems of outsiders such as first-year students; but
also that such authors and writers are not sensitive to the strategies of
effective communication in general, and feel no special responsibility to write
with concentrated attention and precision. Moreover, this insensitivity is
apparently shared by people who publish textbooks or technical manuals and by
people who choose them for university programmes. All down the line, nobody
seems to be specifically delegated to insist upon clarity and precision.
The picture is further complicated by the self-consciousness attitude
among those academics who believe that academic standards require an insistent
usage of specialised registers of discourse. The tendency is then to
“jargonise” or “terminologise,” e.g., by replacing the term “sale” with
“realisation” (as in sample [9] below). Similarly, attempts to make academic
discourse user-friendly may be misunderstood as “lowering the standards” or
“dumbing down.”
The academic context for the teaching and learning of business English
entails yet another complicating factor when English departments and business
faculties operate in mutual separation. English teachers and authors of
textbooks may feel more comfortable staying on the “language” side of the fence
and expatiating about “correct adjectives” and “split infinitives” rather
than analysing communicative problems relating to such matters as “productivity
levels,” “privatisation partners,” “double entry bookkeeping,” and “net
realisable values,” which we shall encounter in our data samples further on.
On the “business” side of the fence, the teachers the authors of their
textbooks may be unconcerned about matters of style, register, and usage.1 They may consider their
subject-matter cut and dried, and do not properly monitor the tendencies, which
we shall see documented in the data analysis, of using technical terms
carelessly and introducing gratuitous quasi-terms in order to sound
businesslike. So they are unlikely to appreciate how much their students could
gain from user-friendly methods of communication.
But if English departments and business faculties could come together
to discuss their priorities and negotiate their disparities, they would soon
realise that their traditional separation is frankly unaffordable at a time
when the linguistic and discursive demands of the rapidly changing global
economy are becoming explosively more complex and diverse. A new orientation is
urgently demanded that would be comprehensive, integrative, democratic, and
socially aware. As teachers and programme designers, we need to identify and
mediate the linguistic and discursive skills which are genuinely relevant to
“post-modern” and “post-industrial” societies and which can have a proper
academic home only when language programmes are resolutely situated at the very
hub of the whole curriculum as a forum for effective and democratic
communication.
The teaching of business English would accordingly be
oriented toward not just helping the students gain access to the currently
practised registers of business English but also toward raising their
sensitivity for the ways in which business English can be rendered more
accessible and user-friendly by means of practical strategies. When these
students go on to enter the business world, their sensitivity could be
gradually propagated until academic and professional settings would exert clear
demands for more appropriate and user-friendly materials.
Pilot Project, Stage I: The English of Business News
I have now outlined the reasoning behind the pilot project I shall
briefly report in two stages and illustrate with authentic data both from
professional sources and from my students. Since the University of Botswana
follows the British system with large lectures and small tutorials, I had the
opportunity to work with my tutorial group at close range.
To collect authentic materials, I began with ones that should be cheap,
plentiful, and reasonably readable, namely reports in the business sections of
the newspapers available here. We have three local ones, all weekly — Mmegi (meaning “Reporter” in Setswana,
the dominant local language), the Gazette,
and the Guardian — plus the Business Day published in Johannesburg
and devoted entirely to business issues.
The samples were printed out as part of a course-script and distributed
among the students. The script also offered comments pointing out how
publishing press
releases about business is also a way of doing business and stimulating
business activity, and not just informing a general public who might read out
of idle curiosity. Yet the ways in which such reports are related to business
trends is often not openly displayed. So students can profit by learning to
read such reports between the lines (what was not said but implied) and, where
appropriate, against the grain (what was not meant to be understood).
The script also supplied a
list of key terms in business news with plain definitions, such as these we
shall see in the data further on:
productivity: how much is produced in proportion to labour and
costs
incentives: public money given to private business to
encourage new initiatives
privatisation: transferring government assets such as industries
into private hands
restructuring: transforming a business in terms of personnel, job
distribution, pay scales, mechanisation, computerisation, and so on
rationalisation: restructuring a business to improve
efficiency and profit
multiskilling: training a worker to do more than one job in the
same business
retrenchment: gradual and scheduled cutbacks in the work force
lay-offs: immediate and unscheduled cutbacks in the work
force
attrition: decline in the work force when people resign or retire on their own
I found business news
routinely using these technical terms without explaining what they mean.
Perhaps readers are expected to be quite knowledgeable about the latest
technical trends in the organisation of businesses; or readers are being
conditioned to read without a deeper understanding of the human consequences of
these terms, such as putting public money into private hands, and putting
workers out of their jobs.
Reports can be
roughly grouped into two types. The “upbeat” or “bullish” ones say business is
great, even if it isn’t, in hopes of stimulating fresh activity and investment.
The “downbeat” or “bearish” ones say business is bad, even if it isn’t, in
hopes of getting people concerned enough to intervene. The second type was
represented by a report bearing the headline “Gaborone rated most expensive
city” (Mmegi 12-18.9.1997). As a
visual aid in my scripts, I underlined the expressions I considered typical of
this genre and register.
[2] Gaborone is the most
expensive city in Africa in terms of office accommodation rates and ranks
69th in the world, according to a survey conducted by
Richard Ellis, the international real estate consultants and property
managers […] Stocker said rental rates in Gaborone were expensive
largely because of the high demand for few office spaces […] Observers
said the high cost of office rentals in Gaborone could be seen as a deterrent
to foreign investors and Botswana could be disadvantaged if investors
were to compare prices in other cities in the Southern African region.
However, it is also worth pointing out that the government often gives
considerable financial and planning incentives to those looking to invest in
the country.
I was at first surprised by
the headline, since the prices here for most goods and services are
significantly lower than the ones I have encountered in major cities of Europe
and North America. But the report was calculated to encourage government
agencies to hand out “considerable financial and planning incentives” lest they
risk “deterring foreign investors.” Also, Gaborone looks like the “most
expensive city” in Africa mostly because our diamond-based currency is hard and
stable in comparison to the many African currencies that are hugely undervalued
in relation to their local buying power; we abruptly fall back to 69th
place when other continents are take into account.
The strategy
we see here has been richly documented by Martin and Schumann’s (1996) sobering
investigation of “the trap of globalisation,” subtitled “the attack on
democracy and prosperity.” Not only do “foreign investors” legally registered
in offshore tax-havens contribute
nothing to local tax bases, they help themselves to the assets of the local
government through “incentives” and “privatisations.” In the current period of
widespread recession, governments see little choice but to submit to this
systematic drain in order to attract new businesses.
Compare
another of our samples (from the same source) whose intentions and implications
are far less clear, bearing the headline: “Makhaya [a promotion consultant]
preaches productivity gospel.”
[3] The Botswana National Productivity Centre has been set up
by the government to conscientise
Batswana [citizens of Botswana] on the need to change attitudes for the
better at their work-places. “As a government parastatal, we are expected
to generate productivity consciousness in Botswana. It is our hope that
once we have lit the fire of productivity awareness, the nation
will take it upon itself to fan it.” […] “We have to increase our
productivity levels, which have been found by World Bank experts to
be comparatively lower compared to our wages. We should ask ourselves
whether or not we are adding value in our day to day work.” […] He told
the councillors that the training would ensure informed judgement and the
enhancement of improved job performance and subsequently contribute to
the attainment of the organisation’s objectives and goals.
Like our neighbour South
Africa, Botswana has numerous “parastatals,” which appear to be varying mixes
of public and private control. Their function and organisation seem
correspondingly vague, especially under such titles as “Productivity Centre.”
For the wholly
uninitiated, this “preached gospel” from the BNPC, nicknamed in Setswana “Are
direng ka natla” (“let’s work hard”), might sound like some private language or
bureaucratic code. Some expressions are decidedly abstract (e.g.
“conscientise,” “productivity awareness”) and redundant (e.g. “comparatively
lower compared to,” “enhancement of improved performance,” “objectives and
goals”). The only concrete expressions are found in the marvellously inept and
yet apt metaphor of “lighting” and “fanning fires,” probably to awaken
associations with the practice, well known in sub-Saharan Africa, of burning
over land to restore fertility, but accidentally symbolising the potentially
voracious and destructive quality of the concrete practices.
To explore those practices,
I recommended to my students an “intertextual” activity we might call,
referring to the format of newspapers, “reading sideways”: interpreting one
news report in light of others in the same journal. One sample was the bullish
report [4] bearing the headline “Airline gets ready for privatisation”:
[4] Air Botswana turned
its first profit ever this year, which means the airline will start looking
for privatisation partners […] [An airline spokesperson said:] “There
was a complete restructuring” […] “Over the years a staff of 430
became 90 through voluntary retrenchment and natural attrition,
but productivity boomed. We turned to multiskilling and staff
training programmes. We continued to handle the same number of passengers.”
We can now fill in some of
the message behind the “gospel” of [3]: “productivity” shall be “increased” at
the same time as workplaces and workers are being eliminated for the sake of
“turning a profit.” How? By giving one worker several jobs to do at the same
wages, in this case in the ratio of 1 to 3.8 — 90 workers doing 430 jobs to
“handle the same number of passengers.” This message is effectively camouflaged
behind a battery of fashionable business-English terms: “restructuring,”
“voluntary retrenchment,” “natural attrition,” “multiskilling,” and “staff
training.”
Samples like
these can help students understand how the business English of news reports is
tailored to specific readers who know what these technical expressions mean and
whose interests are being served; and how such reports encourage ordinary
readers to believe that all is for the best. The analogy between a “gospel” and
the discourse of “productivity” in [3] is not merely fanciful; some leap of
faith is demanded for the logic that an industry should be run at public
expense when it operates at a loss, and instantly “privatised” when it makes a
“profit.” An airline official who was later questioned on the wisdom of such
proceedings vowed, in tones of a mystical universalism, that “privatisation
means a better life for all.” How is “life better” for the 340 airline
employees who lost their jobs?
I shall close this section
by examining a partly bearish and partly bullish sample from our neighbour
South Africa (Johannesburg Business Day,
16.9.1997), whose ingenious argumentation merits a deal of reading between the
lines and against the grain. The ambitious programme of the Mandela government
to provide decent low-rent housing for the millions of African citizens still
languishing in the slums of the “townships” and “locations” created by
apartheid is naturally viewed by the private housing industry as unwelcome
competition and a heavy drag on real estate prices. So the article portrays the
programme as an exercise in “prescriptive bureaucratic control” and “state
intervention” that violates the principles of a “democratic society,” “wastes
money,” and ignores the lessons of “history.” Already the headline is richly
symbolic: “Balancing control and free market needs.”
[5] Should
consumers be protected from the financial risk of structural defects? If so,
how should the consumer protection be paid for? The controversy reflects a deeper
conflict of approaches: prescriptive bureaucratic control versus free
competition in a democratic society. History demonstrates that delivery and
standards can best be enhanced through competitive economic activity;
the goal of state intervention should be to enable markets to work and
not to prescribe to and exercise control over entrepreneurs and consumers.
The council and these authorities are attempting to do what the poor can do
better (that is, build houses); in the process we are wasting money
which could be better spent on things the poor cannot do, namely
production of infrastructure and housing support. Instead of the prescriptive
building code, the level of building standards should be negotiated
between suppliers and consumers and specified in a contract. To enable this
we need maximum flexibility, […] depending on the source of the end
user’s finances. […] Over-regulated markets will tend to become cost-ineffective,
unproductive and slow on output [and will] stifle the
initiative which drives development. […]
At present, the most rapid
delivery of housing is happening through the “self-help” efforts of homeless
householders [sic] themselves, as they erect informal structures and
convert these into a home, with hundreds and thousands of units arising in a
mosaic of seeming unplanned yet inherently rational urban form. The typical
SA informal settlement is a useful example of appropriate usage of
resources. [and] addresses many priorities of the urban poor. […]
Kimberly and Johannesburg were once informal sheet iron settlements and
are now sophisticated urban environments. (Johannesburg Business Day, 16.9.1997)
The report solemnly warns
the nation against the dire dangers of “over-regulated markets” “becoming
cost-ineffective, unproductive and slow on output” — in plain language,
yielding lower private profits for the housing industry. So the government is
told to stand aside, whilst private “suppliers” upgrade the “housing” already
“delivered” “through the self-help efforts of homeless householders,” and under
“contracts” whereby the “suppliers” can (freely) “negotiate” the maximum prices
from each “end user’s finances” and can (freely) insert abstrusely worded
disclaimers of legal responsibility for “structural defects.” How much money
might be made by installing electricity can be judged from a report in the same
issue of Business Day that only 54.6%
of South African homes now have electricity.
The discourse
itself actually anticipates the “conversion” in its business terminology for
describing a “township,” where, as Steve Biko (1978: 109) has famously
remarked, it is “a miracle for anyone to live up to adulthood.” The draughty
overcrowded hovels are called “informal structures,” already well on their way
to being “converted into homes.” The slum districts are in turn called “informal
settlements” constituting a “mosaic of seeming unplanned yet inherently
rational urban form,” “exemplifying appropriate usage of resources,” and
“addressing many priorities of the urban poor.” If you doubt that “informal
sheet iron settlements” will get transformed into “sophisticated urban
environments,” you just recall the history of “Kimberly and Johannesburg” and
forget whose low-paid labour in the mines transformed them, and how many of the
homes of those same labourers are still “informal sheet iron settlements” a
century later.
Samples [2]
through [5] illustrate the materials I presented in order to familiarise the
students with the vocabulary and rhetoric of business news. They can focus
their attention on the ways of composing such reports, but also on ways of
reading them between the lines and, where appropriate, against the grain. They
can develop an inside understanding of the significances and motivations of
public discourse about business, especially for trendy topics like
“productivity,” “privatisation,” and “foreign investment,” which are grandly
heralded to bring a “better life for all.”
Following the
analysis of samples, the students were assigned to write their own business
news, using strategies similar to these we had surveyed. The results reassured
me that my students had a good grasp of the vocabulary and rhetoric plus a
lively sense of humour and a sensitivity toward local conditions, witness the
bullish assignment [6] handed in by Kutlwano:
[6] Hillside Farms (Pty)
LTD is a newly opened business enterprise dealing in ostrich meat
and related products. With the recent mad cow and cattle lung diseases,
we, the management and staff of Hillside Farms, take it as our
responsibility to provide safer and more affordable alternative of red meat
to our valued customers. “We are fully committed to our
consumer’s rights, and we shall continue to supply quality products,”
said General Manager Mrs. Macca Mswela [in reality the name of
Kutlwano’s own mother]. “Since the acquisition of the farm, we have undergone
a drastic rationalisation programme which should facilitate higher
financial returns in the future. Ostrich meat is healthier, cheaper and
tastier, and contains less fat than other red meat, so if you haven’t made the
change, now is the time.”
Students who can write copy
like this should have no trouble finding work in business reporting,
advertising, or public relations.
Pilot Project, Stage II: The English of Accounting
After working with the public discourse of business
English, we proceeded to work with specifically academic discourse. Again
adopting a bottom-up approach, I examined the textbooks my students were
concurrently using in their business courses. I decided to concentrate on the
English of accounting, where the textbooks indicated a pressing need for more
accessible and user-friendly discourse.
Accounting covers a complex and peculiar range of
discourse. Much of the work consists of organising information in ways designed
for specialised communication to owners, managers, auditors, tax officials, and
so on. One assigned of the assigned textbooks — I shall again refer to them
only by letters — opens with the pithy epigram “accounting is the language of
business” (C: 1). What the book doesn’t say is that accounting is an insiders’ language par excellence,
designed to generate financial statistics for owners and managers and to comply
with institutional regulations but not to provide user-friendly information for
outsiders, such as ordinary consumers and customers. And, although the textbook
claims in its preface to be “a highly readable and informative introduction to
the subject” (C: xi), it remains serenely insensitive to the problems this
specialised design can create for first-year business students.
My script recommended a set of
strategies for producing or revising the English of accounting:
1. Avoid saying the obvious.
2. Avoid using unnecessary words.
3. Avoid using technical terms when ordinary ones will do just as well.
4. Watch out for illogical mixtures or combinations.
5. Highlight and define the necessary technical terms use them
consistently afterwards, rather than using different terms for the same thing
or the same term for different things.
6. Use parallel patterns
when you compare or contrast.
One simple
demonstration I presented was the definition of “accounting” itself:
[7] Accounting is most widely defined as the process of identifying,
measuring, and communicating economic information to permit informed judgements
and decisions by users of the information (Textbook D: 253) (total of 26 words)
The most obvious drawbacks
are the repetitious “informed” and “information” and the unnecessary “users”:
who else could possibly be meant, and what else could their “judgements and
decisions” be? Less obvious is the odd logic of the three verbs whose direct
object collocates well only with the last verb (“communicate information”):
accountants “identify” and “measure” assets, losses, and so on, and not
“information.” I pointed out these problems and then proposed my revision which
solved them by being shorter and plainer, yet also more logical:
[7a] Accounting consists of finding,
organising, and communicating economic information to users who need it for
making sound judgements and decisions. (19 words)
We then
moved on to longer and more complex samples and problems, as we find them in
[8] from Textbook D.
[8] Capital: at an
elementary level it is taken to mean the effective amount of money that’s being
used in the business. Thus, if all the assets were added together and the
liabilities of the business deducted, the answer would be that the difference
is the amount of money employed in the business. You will by now realise that
this is the same as the closing balance of the capital account. It is sometimes
also called net assets (77 words)
The passage ostensibly sets
out to define the what term “capital” would “mean,” but ends up equating it
with two more specific terms, “closing balance of the capital account” and “net
assets,” as if all three could be used interchangeably. The meaning actually
given fits only the two latter terms, whilst the meaning of the first remains
unclear, due to vague and shifting terms like “effective amount” and “money
being used” or “employed.” A business certainly can be “effectively using” more
“money” than the proposed calculation would specify — add up assets, then
subtract liabilities — simply by deferring the payment of liabilities.
Presumably, the author intended to alert readers to one “elementary” use of the
term “capital,” though the end of the book seems an odd place to do so,
especially if students will indeed have “realised by now” what is meant. My
revision [8a] would be more appropriate and less prone to mislead, and could
aptly go near the start of the book:
[8a] You should be aware
that the term “capital” is sometimes
used in a simple sense or short cut to stand for the “net assets” and for the “closing
balance of the capital account.” These two longer terms
designate the amount left over when total liabilities have been deducted from
the total assets. (49 words)
The simple
term now “stands for” the longer two as a “short-cut,” rather than being “the
same”; and the inaccurate stipulation of “being used” is deleted.
We gradually
come to work with longer passages, where revision addresses more global issues,
especially the verbosity and lack of clarity in the English of accounting
textbooks, as in sample [9], also from Textbook D.
[9] Net
realisable value means the estimated amount that would be received from the
sale of the asset less the estimated costs on its disposal. The term “exit
value” is often used as it is the amount receivable when an asset leaves the
business. A very important factor affecting such a valuation is the conditions
under which the assets are to be sold. To realise in a hurry would often mean
accepting a very low price. Look at the sale prices received from stock in
bankruptcies — usually very low figures. The standard way of approaching this
problem is to value as though the realisation were “in the normal course of
business.” This is not capable of an absolutely precise meaning, as economic
conditions change and the firm might never sell such an asset “in the normal
course of business.”
The difficulties of
establishing an asset’s net realisable value are similar to those of the
replacement value method when similar assets are not being bought and sold in
the marketplace. However, the problems are more severe as the units of service
approach cannot be used, since that takes the seller’s rather than the buyer’s
viewpoint. (194 words)
This passage
sets out to tell you the “meaning” of “net realisable value,” but actually
tells tell you how elusive that meaning is. In effect, you are counselled to
“valuate” by assuming you are selling the asset “in the normal course of
business” and are not in any “hurry,” even though the asset might in fact
“never be sold” or else only under highly non-“normal” conditions such as
“bankruptcies.” Such a “valuation” is purely theoretical.
Moreover, you are restricted from using the buying price you would pay
to “replace” the asset, because you are in the role of a hypothetical seller,
not a buyer, and you could hardly sell a used asset for the same price as a new
one would cost. This restriction gets oddly obscured in the final paragraph, which compares “net realisable value” with
“replacement value.” Since the first of these two “valuations” is the theme of
the whole passage, the proximate reading would be that “net realisable value”
creates “more severe problems.” But that reading would work only if the terms
“buyer” and “seller” have been accidentally interchanged. The whole passage has
insisted on taking the seller’s viewpoint, whereas here the text says “the
seller’s viewpoint” “cannot be used.”
Sample [9] illustrates how sheer verbosity can create confusing
discourse even without any substantial proportion of technical business terms.
I would single out the redundant series of casually interchanged terms for much
the same transaction: “sale - disposal - exit - amount receivable - leaves the
business - sold - realise - prices received - realisation - sell.” Several of
these are a bit ironic in view of the acknowledged improbability of the asset
really “leaving the business.”
Here is my own revision:
[9a] Estimating the net
realisable value or exit value is
done by calculating the sum that would be left after selling an asset and
subtracting the costs of the sale process. Because the conditions for selling
can affect the price in unpredictable ways, as when stock gets quickly sold off
after a bankruptcy, you can base your estimate on the value you would
presumably receive selling the asset at a time when the business is operating
normally.
Estimating the replacement value is done by calculating
the sum that would be spent to actually buy the asset again. Problems naturally
arise if the asset is currently not on the market. Also, you cannot calculate
by units of service, which would be adopting the seller’s viewpoint rather than
the buyer’s. (127 words)
My version
is uses one-third fewer words than the original and eliminates the redundant
series of partial synonyms for “selling” noted in [9]. I also dispensed with
the repetitions of “net realisable value,” “estimated,” “low price/low
figures,” “in the normal course of business”; and I replaced “not being bought
and sold in the marketplace” with “currently not on the market.”
More significantly, I have treated “replacement value” as a second theme in its own right whose
explanation is part of the purpose of the passage rather than a confusing sidelight.
I have highlighted this equal status by italicising the respective terms and by
using parallel choices of vocabulary and grammar in the opening sentence of the
respective paragraphs.
As we can see, organising business discourse in terms of themes and
purposes can provide a valuable framework for enhancing clarity. But,
especially in longer discourses, the recognition of themes and purposes cannot
be taken for granted, especially when the original passage is rather
disorganised; so we practised strategies for finding the key usages and
expressions and grouping them under some general labels. As a visual aid, I
proposed marking the elements of the several themes or purposes in distinctive
ways, e.g., with highlighter pens in different colours. To demonstrate in black
and white on sample [10] (Textbook C: 49), I shall use underlining in normal
typeface for terms about money coming
in like “profit”; underlining in bold for terms about money going out like “commissions paid”;
and bold in normal typeface for
terms about the prospective work of
accountants like “calculated.” [These options had to be chosen for Web
Pages!] The italics shown here were in the original. The sample would then look
like this:
[10] The
balance of profit, which is arrived
at by matching sales proceeds with the actual costs of goods sold, is called gross profit. In practice, many other costs are also incurred, such as salaries paid out to employees, commissions paid to salesmen, rent and rates for the showroom and office accommodation, and the numerous incidental expenses such as stationery, etc. Since these outlays are incurred
to help generate sales revenue, they must also be deducted to leave a final
balance called net profit.
Revenues and expenditures
are matched against one another in
the trading
account and the profit and loss account
(usually abbreviated to trading and profit
and loss account).
The gross profit is calculated in the trading account and the remaining
expenses are deducted in the
profit and loss account.
It might occur to readers that the calculation
of profit on the basis of changes in capital is a rather more straightforward process than by comparing revenue with expenditure. The accumulation of figures for sales revenue and the many items of expenditure incurred
during the year is a far more laborious
and time-consuming task than the identification of figures for capital
at just two dates: the beginning and the end of the accounting period. Part of the justification
for the extra work is that trading
transactions entered into during an accounting period are recorded, not only to enable profit
to be measured, but also to facilitate effective control over inflows
and outflows of cash and
goods, e.g. to ensure that cash
is collected from customers and that employees
are paid the amounts due to them. (266 words)
Several factors here are not
conducive to user-friendly comprehension. We find several series of terms that
might be merely different ways of saying the same thing; or, we might need to
pay attention to the differences: “sales proceeds - sales revenue - Revenues -
inflows - cash collected”; or “costs - expenses - outlays - expenditures -
outflows.” Insiders will know, for example, that “revenue” is a more general
term, whereas “sales proceeds,” “sales revenue,” and “cash collected” would all
be more specific instances of “revenue.” But this one passage fails to make
those differences clear. We also might wonder why the terms got varied so much,
e.g., why we need “revenue” and “inflow,” or why we must have “expenses,”
“outlays,” “expenditures,” and “outflows” if the differences among them are not
shown to be relevant to the explanation.
A further
thematic point of interest is how much less emphasis got placed upon money
coming in than upon money going out. We have only two indicators of where the
money is coming from, namely “sales proceeds” and “cash collected from
customers.” In contrast, we have no less than nine specifications of where the
money is going to: “costs of goods - salaries - commissions - rent - rates
[i.e., taxes on land or buildings paid to a local government] - showroom -
office accommodation - stationery - employees paid.” Notice too the repetitious
sequence of these two verbs: “incurred - paid out - paid - incurred - incurred
- paid.” What differences could there be between “salaries paid out to employees” and simply “salaries of employees,” or
between “items of expenditure incurred
during the year” and simply “items of expenditure during the year”? For
comprehension, I can see no differences: by definition, “salaries” and
“commissions” get “paid,” and “expenditures” get “incurred.” But deeper down,
the authors are pursuing the goal of convincing businesses that they need accountants in order to “facilitate
effective control” over their money. Notice how the list of “expenditures,”
going all the way down to “stationery,” makes no mention of the fees of the
accountants, who will have to be paid well for “the extra work” spent on the
“laborious and time-consuming tasks” the passage expressly “justifies.” If you
keep on saying “incurred” and “paid,” business persons may feel as if they will
get pinched or drained on all sides if they don’t hire accountants.
Here is my revision into
plainer and more user-friendly language:
[10a] The gross profit is the amount left of the
money you gained selling your goods, minus the money you paid buying those
goods. The net profit is the final
amount left after you have also subtracted all your other costs, such as the
employees’ salaries, the salespersons’ commissions, the rent and tax rates for
showrooms and office accommodations, and incidental expenses such as
stationery.
The revenue, being the total amount of money
coming in, gets matched against the expenditure,
being the total amount of money going out, in the trading and profit and loss account. This handy term combines the “trading account,” in which the gross
profit is calculated, with the “profit
and loss account,” in which every sum coming in or going out is recorded.
You might object that it
would be much simpler to calculate profit by seeing how much the total amount
of your money has changed from the starting date up to the end date of the
accounting period, instead of figuring up all the items of revenue against all
the items of expenditure during the year. But the extra work is well worth it,
because recording your trading transactions during the whole period helps you
not just to measure your profits, but also to effectively control how much cash
and goods are coming in and going out, for example, when you need to collect
cash from your customers or pay salaries to your employees. (239 words)
In this
version, parallel expressions and patterns have been deployed to clarify the
differences between “gross profit” versus “net profit,” as well as between
“trading account” versus “profit and loss account.” The latter comparison has
been incorporated into the preceding paragraph to join the introduction of
other terms; the justification of “the extra work” can then logically occupy a
paragraph by itself, preserving the author’s purpose without resorting to the
jack-hammer repetitions of “incurred” and “paid.” The purpose of the “profit
and loss account” has also been defined more clearly than “deducting the
remaining expenses.”
I hope you will grant that my revisions of the authentic samples of the
English of accounting are more user-friendly and thus more considerate of the
students as “customers.” But you may want to ask whether first-year students
for whom English is a second language can be reasonably expected to practice
such strategies on their own as part of a course module occupying, in this
instance, three weeks, each with two lectures plus three tutorial sessions, all
45 minutes long.
In my tutorials, I began by distributing brief samples like [7-10],
showing how to apply the strategies stated at the start of this section, and
finally displaying my own revision. Soon the students were making their own
revisions, which I would critique or mark up with the group before showing them
mine. At the end of the module, the assignment was issued to find a passage of
similar length in Textbooks C or D and make a revision; both passages would be
handed in the following week.
My student Mpho certainly showed how to cure the problems of saying the
obvious and using unnecessary words when she revised the verbose sample [11]
from Textbook D into the brisk and businesslike version [11a]:
[11] In some clubs and societies members can make a payment for life
membership. This means that by paying a fairly substantial amount now the
member can enjoy the facilities of the club for the rest of his life. (38
words)
[11a] Some clubs’ members
pay enough money to enjoy the facilities of the club for life. (15 words)
The original
[11] repeated such items as “club,” “member,” “pay,” and “life,” whereas the
revision [11a] repeats only “club.” Worse, [11] patronisingly suggested that
students need an explanation of what “life membership means,” even though this
is hardly a technical term and “means” exactly what it says; and that they
could not easily infer that the “amount” would be “fairly substantial.” [11a]
conveys the relevant content without any such patronisingly suggestions.
My student Modibedi chose sample [12], again from Textbook D, doubtless
seeing good possibilities for slashing the flagrant verbosity.
[12] We have seen that every
transaction affects two items. If we want to show the effect of every
transaction when we are doing our bookkeeping, we will have to show the effect
of a transaction on each of the two items. For each transaction that means that
a bookkeeping entry will have to be made to show an increase or decrease of
that item. From there you will probably be able to see that the term “double
entry” bookkeeping is a good one, as each entry is made twice (double entry).
(91 words)
The original
text leads up to the main concept of the “double entry bookkeeping” in a manner
so circuitous and repetitious as to imply a rather unflattering estimate of the
readers’ powers of comprehension, e.g., repeating “item” three times, “entry”
four times, and “transaction” no less than five times. Simply cutting back the
verbiage would be a great improvement, as in my own revision:
[12a] Every transaction
affects two items in ways we can show in our bookkeeping as an increase or
decrease of each one. Doing so is termed “double entry” bookkeeping. (29 words)
But Modibedi’s
revision made more radical changes than mine:
[12b] The “Double Entry
System” is the basic system of modern bookkeeping by which each account has two
sides, a debit side and a credit side, and each business deal is entered twice.
(32 words)
He adroitly
moved the key term up into the strategic initial position and highlighted it in
upper case, so that the reader knows right off where the explanation is
heading. He self-reliantly replaced the terms “increase” or “decrease” with the
correct bookkeeping terms “credit” and “debit.”
I shall wind up with a more complex illustration of skilful student
work. N!ko!ko2 chose from Textbook D the more challenging material
of [13] on “bad debts”:
[13] With many businesses a large proportion, if not all, of the sales
are on a credit basis. The business is therefore taking the risk that some of
the customers may never pay for the goods sold to them on credit. This is a
normal business risk and therefore bad debts as they are called are a normal
business expense and must be charged as such when calculating the profit or
loss account for the period.
When a debt is found to be
bad, the debt as shown by the debtor’s amount is worthless and must accordingly
be eliminated as an asset account. This is done by crediting the debtor’s
account to cancel the asset and increasing the expenses account of bad debts by
debiting it there. Sometimes, the debtor will have paid part of the debt,
leaving the remainder to be written off as a bad debt. The total of the bad
debts account is later transferred to the profit and loss account. (163 words)
N!ko!ko’s
revision read like this:
[13a] Many businesses sell a large proportion of their goods on credit,
although it’s a risk because some of the customers may never pay. The amount
which is not paid at the end of a year is called bad debts. They are an expense
and therefore must be charged to the Profit and Loss for the period.
When a debt is found to be
bad, it must be removed as an asset. To do this, the debtor’s account is
credited and the bad debts account is debited. If the debtor has paid off part
of the debt, the remainder will be written off as a bad debt. (106 words).
She vigorously trimmed away
the patronising excess verbiage from [13]: “for the goods sold to them on
credit” (what else would they not “pay for”?); “as shown by the debtor’s
amount” (where else?); a “bad debt” is “worthless” (obviously); plus the entire
last sentence about “the profit and loss account,” which just repeated what had
been stated already. She also saw no point in including “if not all,” or in
designating “bad debts” twice over as a part of “normal business.” Finally,
repetitions have been dramatically reduced: “business” from 5 times to 1, and
“debt” from 7 times to 4.
Conclusion
I have tried to describe and illustrate some reasonably workable steps
toward a more realistic and dynamic approach to teaching and learning business
English, one that might integrate the often divisive concerns of teaching
English and teaching business. The next project would be to design an entire
introductory course along these lines and to test its user-friendliness. I would
also turn to the local business community to complement my samples of public
discourse and academic discourse with authentic samples of professional discourse. A
particularly interesting step would be to interview employers
of our graduates regarding the kind of English skills they would most deeply
appreciate, and ask them to make choices about ‘which of these candidates would
your business be likely to hire, based on these writing samples?’ We could
selectively manipulate those factors we intuitively believe to be influential
until we have some kind of reliable grid to feed back into the advice and
activities we provide for our learners.
Especially in its pilot stages, my approach was judged decidedly
unconventional by my colleagues, whose graduate training was largely in
universities in Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, and of course the UK. Perhaps because
none of them had specialised in business communication, they did not share my
discomfort over textbooks and materials that are plainly more at home in
English departments than in Colleges of Business. Perhaps in matters relating
to language and communication, our whole university curricula need to recognise
the importance of retailoring our approaches from the bottom up by using
authentic contemporary materials and designing activities that are appropriate
to distinctive multicultural environments.
NOTES
1. Hairston’s (1981) report of prescriptive language attitudes among
some business personnel aptly noted that these were largely the result of
encounters with prescriptive English teachers in the schools.
2. The exclamation marks signal in this case lateral clicks produced on
both edges of the tongue in contact with the hard palate.
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