1. To be polite, use past tenses:
- Talking to your customers: Did you have a visa card?
- Talking to your boss: I was wondering if I could talk to you.
Why: Past tenses create a distance between you and the one you talk to. Check out the distance between you and your customers from the diagram. The longer the distance, the more polite you are. So you can use past tenses to give advice: If I were you, I would not tell your boss about it.
2. Put big things at the end:
Read the conversations:
Read the conversations:
- How was the presentation? I think it went well.
- How quickly do your co-workers work? The work extremely fast.
- Can I get a discount? You get a discount if you order in bulk.
This is one of the reasons why Westerners start a sentence with ‘it‘.
e.g. It is true that we have to follow our company’s policy.
(‘It’ is nothing big in the sentence.)
3. Never write or say ‘There has / have two customers in the waiting room’.
The ‘original’ sentence goes like this: Two customers are in the waiting room. So it is:
There are two customers in the waiting room.
4. How to make a complex sentence from a simple one.
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Our company needs
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new marketing ideas
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What our company needs
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is
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new marketing ideas
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So it is easy.
Just add ‘what‘ and ‘is‘ to make the sentence complex.
5. To speak simple but good English, spot ‘the verb’ in a sentence.
We saw oil price rise last year.
Just let me know (if you need any help).
We encourage our staff to make their own decisions.
We are pleased to announce the appointment of a new CEO.
(Hint: The verb usually comes first in a sentence. In terms of grammar, it it the finite verb of a sentence.)
