{"course":{"slug":"visual-storytelling","title":"Making It Say Something","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling","level":"beginner","track":"create"},"lesson":{"slug":"writing-for-second-language-readers","title":"Most people reading your English did not grow up in it","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/writing-for-second-language-readers","position":40,"of":64,"minutes":9,"answer":"The cost for a second-language reader sits in phrasal verbs, idiom, stacked negation and elegant variation rather than in complex ideas, so use the same word for the same thing, prefer single-word verbs.","keyIdea":"The cost for a second-language reader sits in phrasal verbs, idiom, stacked negation and elegant variation rather than in complex ideas, so use the same word for the same thing, prefer single-word verbs, and treat readability scores as a smoke alarm rather than a target."},"body":{"format":"markdown","text":"## The arithmetic\n\nThere are roughly four hundred million first-language English speakers and somewhere between one and one and a half billion people who use English as a second, third or working language. For anything published on the open internet (and certainly for anything published from or about South Asia, Africa, or most of Europe) the majority of your English-reading audience learned it in a classroom.\n\nThey are not less intelligent readers and frequently they have better formal grammar than native speakers. What differs is specific and predictable: **idiom, phrasal verbs, low-frequency vocabulary, and culture-bound reference.**\n\n## Phrasal verbs are the single biggest cost\n\nA phrasal verb is a verb plus a particle whose meaning cannot be derived from the parts: *put off*, *get by*, *take on*, *run into*, *come across*, *work out*, *turn down*, *hold up*.\n\nEnglish has thousands of them, they are extremely common in casual writing, and they are individually unguessable. *Turn down* means reject, reduce, or fold, depending. A reader who knows *turn* and knows *down* has no route to any of these. Worse, they are not obviously hard: the words are all short and common, so the sentence looks simple and will not parse.\n\n> Figure: Phrasal verbs, and the single words that replace them. Unguessable from the parts: turn down the order; the machine gave out; work out the cost; come up against a problem; put off the decision. Survives a second language: refuse the order; the machine failed; calculate the cost; meet a problem; delay the decision. Every word on the left is short and common, which is why the sentence looks simple and will not parse. The difficulty is in the language, not in the idea, so simplifying the argument is the wrong lever.\n\nThe fix is not to avoid them entirely, which produces stilted text. It is to prefer the single-word verb **where the phrasal one is doing the load-bearing work of the sentence**:\n\n- \"we had to turn down the order\" → \"we had to refuse the order\"\n- \"the machine gave out\" → \"the machine failed\"\n- \"work out the cost\" → \"calculate the cost\"\n\n## Four more things that cost disproportionately\n\n1. **Stacked negation.** \"Not unlike\", \"it is not uncommon for this to fail to work\". Each negation must be resolved, and they compound. Say the positive.\n2. **Culture-bound reference.** Cricket, baseball, a 1970s advertisement, a politician, a sitcom. These are invisible to the writer because they feel like general knowledge. If a reference is load-bearing, make the sentence work without it.\n3. **Elegant variation.** Native writers are taught not to repeat a word, so a piece calls the same object a *lathe*, a *machine*, a *tool* and *the unit*. To a second-language reader this reads as four things. **Use the same word for the same thing, every time.** It is worse prose and much better communication.\n4. **Numbers written as words.** \"Two thousand four hundred\" is harder than \"2,400\" for almost everyone and much harder across languages with different grouping conventions. Use digits. Also state currencies explicitly: `₹`, `£`, `$` alone is ambiguous across several countries.\n\n## What does not help\n\n**Readability formulas.** Flesch–Kincaid and its relatives count syllables per word and words per sentence. That is all they count. They therefore reward chopping a clear sentence into three fragments and punish using the correct technical term because it has four syllables. A text can score as \"easy\" while being incomprehensible, and a well-structured explanatory paragraph can score as difficult while being the clearest thing on the page.\n\nUse them as a rough smoke alarm for drafts that have drifted into 60-word sentences. Do not use them as a target, because optimising a proxy is how you end up with text that is measurably simple and functionally useless.\n\n**Simplifying the ideas.** This is the thing people do instead, and it is the wrong lever. The difficulty is in the language, not the content. A second-language reader can follow a complex argument perfectly well; they cannot follow *come up against*.\n\n## Translation, machine and otherwise\n\nIf you are publishing across languages, machine translation is now good enough to be useful and not good enough to be trusted with anything that matters. Its characteristic failures are exactly the categories above (idiom, ambiguity, and terms with a specific meaning in your field) plus one more: it produces fluent, confident text when it is wrong, so errors do not look like errors.\n\nThe free, practical path: machine-translate, then have one fluent speaker read it for sense, not for grammar. That one pass catches the reversals of meaning, which are the failures that actually damage you. Keep a short list of your key terms with their agreed translations, so the same thing does not get three names across a site.\n\n## The limitation\n\nEverything here optimises for comprehension, and comprehension is not the only thing writing does. Idiom, rhythm and reference are also how a piece establishes that it comes from somewhere and belongs to someone. Text stripped of all of it reads like an instruction manual, and an instruction manual persuades nobody.\n\nThe judgement is about what each piece is for. Safety information, instructions, prices, anything where being misunderstood has a cost: strip it. A personal essay, a piece whose value is voice, work aimed at a community that shares the references: keep the idiom and accept that some readers will work harder. What you should not do is make that choice by accident, which is what happens when you never think about who is reading."},"check":{"question":"Why does calling the same object a \"lathe\", then \"the machine\", then \"the unit\" cost a second-language reader more than repeating one word would?","options":[{"text":"Each synonym is drawn from a lower-frequency band than the one before it, so the vocabulary difficulty accumulates steadily across the paragraph until the reader stalls.","correct":false,"tempting":"Assumes the synonyms are rarer words, but the cost appears even when all three are common; the problem is reference, not frequency."},{"text":"Machine translation renders each synonym differently, so translated versions of the text become inconsistent.","correct":false,"tempting":"Names a genuine downstream problem for translation while missing what happens to a reader reading the English directly."},{"text":"Repetition aids memory, so varied wording makes the object harder to recall later in the piece.","correct":false,"tempting":"Explains by recall rather than by comprehension, which predicts a delayed difficulty instead of the immediate confusion that actually occurs."},{"text":"Without a shared assumption that variation is stylistic, the reader has to work out whether these are one object or several.","correct":true}]},"prev":{"slug":"curse-of-knowledge","title":"You cannot un-know the thing you are explaining","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/curse-of-knowledge"},"next":{"slug":"brand-is-a-system","title":"Your brand is not the logo, it is what you repeat","url":"https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/brand-is-a-system"},"authorship":"Founder and series editor: Dr Mustafa Mun. Written by AI models to a written standard. Exam keys checked blind by a second model: 3,665 of 3,666 agreed. Academic review invited.","review":{"status":"Draft, open for academic review"},"cite":"Addaly (2026) 'Most people reading your English did not grow up in it', in Making It Say Something. Edited by M. Mun. Addaly. Available at: https://addaly.com/learn/visual-storytelling/writing-for-second-language-readers (Accessed: 13 October 2026).","licence":{"name":"CC BY-NC-SA 4.0","url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/"},"reader":{"schema":1,"title":"Most people reading your English did not grow up in it","courseTitle":"Making It Say Something","module":{"index":5,"slug":"words-that-carry","title":"Words that carry the picture"},"answer":null,"keyIdea":"The cost for a second-language reader sits in phrasal verbs, idiom, stacked negation and elegant variation rather than in complex ideas, so use the same word for the same thing, prefer single-word verbs, and treat readability scores as a smoke alarm rather than a target.","hero":{"kind":"figure","figure":{"t":"figure","label":"Figure","figure":{"left":{"title":"Unguessable from the parts","items":["turn down the order","the machine gave out","work out the cost","come up against a problem","put off the decision"]},"type":"compare","right":{"title":"Survives a second language","items":["refuse the order","the machine failed","calculate the cost","meet a problem","delay the decision"]},"title":"Phrasal verbs, and the single words that replace them","caption":"Every word on the left is short and common, which is why the sentence looks simple and will not parse. The difficulty is in the language, not in the idea, so simplifying the argument is the wrong lever."},"alt":"Figure: Phrasal verbs, and the single words that replace them. Unguessable from the parts: turn down the order; the machine gave out; work out the cost; come up against a problem; put off the decision. Survives a second language: refuse the order; the machine failed; calculate the cost; meet a problem; delay the decision. Every word on the left is short and common, which is why the sentence looks simple and will not parse. The difficulty is in the language, not in the idea, so simplifying the argument is the wrong lever."}},"blocks":[{"t":"h2","id":"the-arithmetic","runs":[{"text":"The arithmetic"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"There are roughly four hundred million first-language English speakers and somewhere between one and one and a half billion people who use English as a second, third or working language. For anything published on the open internet (and certainly for anything published from or about South Asia, Africa, or most of Europe) the majority of your English-reading audience learned it in a classroom."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"They are not less intelligent readers and frequently they have better formal grammar than native speakers. What differs is specific and predictable: "},{"text":"idiom, phrasal verbs, low-frequency vocabulary, and culture-bound reference.","b":true}]},{"t":"h2","id":"phrasal-verbs-are-the-single-biggest-cost","runs":[{"text":"Phrasal verbs are the single biggest cost"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"A phrasal verb is a verb plus a particle whose meaning cannot be derived from the parts: "},{"text":"put off","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"get by","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"take on","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"run into","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"come across","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"work out","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"turn down","i":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"hold up","i":true},{"text":"."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"English has thousands of them, they are extremely common in casual writing, and they are individually unguessable. "},{"text":"Turn down","i":true},{"text":" means reject, reduce, or fold, depending. A reader who knows "},{"text":"turn","i":true},{"text":" and knows "},{"text":"down","i":true},{"text":" has no route to any of these. Worse, they are not obviously hard: the words are all short and common, so the sentence looks simple and will not parse."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The fix is not to avoid them entirely, which produces stilted text. It is to prefer the single-word verb "},{"text":"where the phrasal one is doing the load-bearing work of the sentence","b":true},{"text":":"}]},{"t":"ul","items":[[{"text":"“we had to turn down the order” → “we had to refuse the order”"}],[{"text":"“the machine gave out” → “the machine failed”"}],[{"text":"“work out the cost” → “calculate the cost”"}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"four-more-things-that-cost-disproportionately","runs":[{"text":"Four more things that cost disproportionately"}]},{"t":"ol","start":1,"items":[[{"text":"Stacked negation.","b":true},{"text":" “Not unlike”, “it is not uncommon for this to fail to work”. Each negation must be resolved, and they compound. Say the positive."}],[{"text":"Culture-bound reference.","b":true},{"text":" Cricket, baseball, a 1970s advertisement, a politician, a sitcom. These are invisible to the writer because they feel like general knowledge. If a reference is load-bearing, make the sentence work without it."}],[{"text":"Elegant variation.","b":true},{"text":" Native writers are taught not to repeat a word, so a piece calls the same object a "},{"text":"lathe","i":true},{"text":", a "},{"text":"machine","i":true},{"text":", a "},{"text":"tool","i":true},{"text":" and "},{"text":"the unit","i":true},{"text":". To a second-language reader this reads as four things. "},{"text":"Use the same word for the same thing, every time.","b":true},{"text":" It is worse prose and much better communication."}],[{"text":"Numbers written as words.","b":true},{"text":" “Two thousand four hundred” is harder than “2,400” for almost everyone and much harder across languages with different grouping conventions. Use digits. Also state currencies explicitly: "},{"text":"₹","code":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"£","code":true},{"text":", "},{"text":"$","code":true},{"text":" alone is ambiguous across several countries."}]]},{"t":"h2","id":"what-does-not-help","runs":[{"text":"What does not help"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Readability formulas.","b":true},{"text":" Flesch–Kincaid and its relatives count syllables per word and words per sentence. That is all they count. They therefore reward chopping a clear sentence into three fragments and punish using the correct technical term because it has four syllables. A text can score as “easy” while being incomprehensible, and a well-structured explanatory paragraph can score as difficult while being the clearest thing on the page."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Use them as a rough smoke alarm for drafts that have drifted into 60-word sentences. Do not use them as a target, because optimising a proxy is how you end up with text that is measurably simple and functionally useless."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Simplifying the ideas.","b":true},{"text":" This is the thing people do instead, and it is the wrong lever. The difficulty is in the language, not the content. A second-language reader can follow a complex argument perfectly well; they cannot follow "},{"text":"come up against","i":true},{"text":"."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"translation-machine-and-otherwise","runs":[{"text":"Translation, machine and otherwise"}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"If you are publishing across languages, machine translation is now good enough to be useful and not good enough to be trusted with anything that matters. Its characteristic failures are exactly the categories above (idiom, ambiguity, and terms with a specific meaning in your field) plus one more: it produces fluent, confident text when it is wrong, so errors do not look like errors."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The free, practical path: machine-translate, then have one fluent speaker read it for sense, not for grammar. That one pass catches the reversals of meaning, which are the failures that actually damage you. Keep a short list of your key terms with their agreed translations, so the same thing does not get three names across a site."}]},{"t":"h2","id":"the-limitation","runs":[{"text":"The limitation"}],"role":"limit"},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"Everything here optimises for comprehension, and comprehension is not the only thing writing does. Idiom, rhythm and reference are also how a piece establishes that it comes from somewhere and belongs to someone. Text stripped of all of it reads like an instruction manual, and an instruction manual persuades nobody."}]},{"t":"p","runs":[{"text":"The judgement is about what each piece is for. Safety information, instructions, prices, anything where being misunderstood has a cost: strip it. A personal essay, a piece whose value is voice, work aimed at a community that shares the references: keep the idiom and accept that some readers will work harder. What you should not do is make that choice by accident, which is what happens when you never think about who is reading."}]}],"check":{"question":[{"text":"Why does calling the same object a “lathe”, then “the machine”, then “the unit” cost a second-language reader more than repeating one word would?"}],"options":[{"text":[{"text":"Each synonym is drawn from a lower-frequency band than the one before it, so the vocabulary difficulty accumulates steadily across the paragraph until the reader stalls."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Assumes the synonyms are rarer words, but the cost appears even when all three are common; the problem is reference, not frequency."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Machine translation renders each synonym differently, so translated versions of the text become inconsistent."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Names a genuine downstream problem for translation while missing what happens to a reader reading the English directly."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Repetition aids memory, so varied wording makes the object harder to recall later in the piece."}],"correct":false,"tempting":[{"text":"Explains by recall rather than by comprehension, which predicts a delayed difficulty instead of the immediate confusion that actually occurs."}]},{"text":[{"text":"Without a shared assumption that variation is stylistic, the reader has to work out whether these are one object or several."}],"correct":true,"tempting":null}],"order":[0,1,3,2],"why":null},"prev":{"slug":"curse-of-knowledge","title":"You cannot un-know the thing you are explaining","minutes":8},"next":{"slug":"brand-is-a-system","title":"Your brand is not the logo, it is what you repeat","minutes":10}}}