When Your English Speaks for You

Your ability to do your job and your ability to write perfect English are two entirely different things. Unfortunately, the person reading your CV, report, application or professional profile may not keep them quite so separate.

A spelling mistake does not make someone a bad engineer. An awkward sentence does not make them a poor accountant. Using the wrong preposition says nothing about someone's ability to manage a project.

But written English creates an impression, and in a professional situation that impression can matter.

Your Work May Not Be the Problem

A professional can have years of experience, excellent qualifications and considerable knowledge of their subject and still be less confident writing about it in English.

This becomes particularly important when the document is going to someone who does not know you. They cannot see how well you do your job. They only have what you have sent them.

An editor looks for the language problems that can get in the way of that information: grammar, spelling and punctuation, but also sentences that are technically understandable but sound unnatural in English, words that have been used in the wrong context and phrases that have been translated too literally.

The purpose is not to make you sound cleverer. It is to stop the English making you sound less capable than you are.

Correct Isn't Always Natural

This is one of the reasons a spellchecker or grammar checker can only take you so far.

A sentence can contain no obvious error and still sound odd to a native English reader. A word may exist and be correctly spelled but not be the word normally used in that context. A sentence structure that works perfectly well in another language may feel unnecessarily complicated in English.

An editor is reading for those things as well as mistakes.

That distinction matters professionally because unusual English can draw attention away from what you are actually saying. The reader starts noticing the language instead of your experience, argument or expertise.

An Editor Shouldn't Hide Your English

There is another side to this.

Editing someone's professional English does not mean disguising their actual ability to communicate in English.

If a position requires excellent written English, an editor should not rewrite an application so extensively that it gives an employer a false impression of the applicant's own language skills.

The same applies to professional profiles and personal statements. Correcting the English is one thing. Supplying ideas, experience or claims that belong to the professional is another.

Where that line falls depends on the document and what it is being used for, which is something we'll look at separately in How Much Editing Is Too Much?

The Subject Still Belongs to You

An editor can tell you that a sentence is unclear. They cannot necessarily tell you what the sentence should say.

If you are writing about your own profession, you remain the expert. An editor should not quietly change specialist terminology, alter a technical statement or guess at something they do not understand.

They should ask.

That becomes particularly important with technical and specialist documents, which we'll come to in You Are the Expert.

Let the English Do Its Job

Professional English does not have to be flawless because flawless English somehow proves professional competence.

It needs to allow the reader to see the competence that is already there.

A good editor removes the unnecessary distractions without replacing the person behind the document.