Your English Is Fine!

Your English may not be fine.

"Feelgood" posts like this want to pretend that your English skills don't matter. Oh, but they probably do. We all should work on our English.

I frequently tell people who apologize for their English that their English is fine-- because that's usually the truth. It's good enough. But I also tell them they should continue working to improve it if they want to excel in the technical world.

And if someone is very hard to understand, I don't want it to be a surprise and mystery when people don't want to work with them. It's my duty to say that I'm struggling to understand. I also hope my co-workers will tell me when my polemical custom of hyper-terminologizing induces a palpitating thorax. [this post edited to remove typos!]