Page 257 - Effective Communication Soft Skills Strategies For Success by Nitin Bhatnagar, Mamta Bhatnagar

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Communication: Written English | 245

communication excessive use of ‘I’ can make your communication
sound pompous.
iv. Remember, please, your students never ‘give an examination’! They
‘take an examination’ or they ‘appear for an examination’.
v. Remember you ‘reply to’ a person and/or a letter but you ‘answer’ a
telephone call or a letter.
vi. If you ‘speak to’ your colleagues it would imply that you are doing
all the speaking. If you ‘speak with’ them, it means you believe in a
dialogue; you prefer a conversation to a monologue that could be
admonishing in nature.
vii. Similarly, you never ‘write the Minister of Education’. Rather, you
‘write to the Minister of Education’.

viii. Remember please that ‘a book comprises five chapters’ but it ‘consists
of five chapters’.
ix. Use ‘say’ to refer to a person’s actual words or in an indirect
sentence.
e.g., The President said, ‘Children must dream’.
But use ‘tell’ when the indirect sentence has an indirect object.
e.g., The Principal told the striking students to disperse imme diately.
Remember the Table 10.1 for idiomatic usage of ‘say’ versus ‘tell’.

e.g., Never write to a publisher: ‘say us the price of the volume’. Write
instead, ‘tell us the price of the volume’, or better still, ‘let us know
the price of the volume’.
x. ‘Make’ refers to constructing or manufacturing something while ‘do’
suggests accomplishing a thing. So you cannot ‘make exercise’, please.
Similarly, your students do not ‘do noise’. Rather they ‘make noise’ in
the classroom. Table 10.2 once again lists the common usage of ‘make’
and ‘do’.

Table 10.1 The Idiomatic Usage of ‘Say’ Versus ‘Tell’

Say Tell
say one’s prayers tell the truth/a lie
say so tell a story
say no more tell the time
say a good word for tell a secret
tell the price
tell one’s name

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