Skip to content
Menu
en
Sign up

Speaking better

The habits that cost you more than your grammar

Once you can do the job in English, the things holding you back are structural: where the answer sits, how long it took, whether you hedged in front of something you knew cold.

How to be more concise in meetingsWhy long answers happen, what they cost, and the one structural change that fixes most of them.Measured in your report
How to answer the question you were actually askedThe most common finding in most reports, why it happens to competent people, and how to catch it.Measured in your report
How to sound decisive without sounding aggressiveHedging, bluntness, and the narrow band between them, particularly if you are working across cultures.Measured in your report
Are you talking too much in meetings?Talk share, what a healthy number looks like for each kind of meeting, and what to do about it.Measured in your report
English for client calls, when it is not your first languageWhat actually costs you credibility on a client call, and what does not matter at all.Measured in your report

Common questions

Is this about English or about how I come across?
Both, and keeping them apart is the point. Your grammar can be flawless while you still bury the number at the end of a ninety-second answer, and your structure can be perfect while a preposition gives you away. Most tools pick one; a meeting contains both.
Can you actually measure how someone came across?
Some of it, honestly. Talk share, turn length, question counts and hedging are arithmetic on a transcript, computed in code rather than guessed at. Whether you answered the question you were asked is a judgement, and it is shown with the question and your answer side by side so you can disagree with it.
What if the advice does not apply to my role?
It should not be applied uniformly, which is why the report grades against your role and the type of meeting. Seventy per cent of the words is right for a quarterly review and wrong for a discovery call, and a tool that does not know the difference will give you bad advice confidently.