During my six years in Canada, I have had the pleasure of sending many forms, documents and letters, not to mention lots of hard-earned cash, to the following address:
\nConsulate General of Canada
\nImmigration Regional Program Centre
\n3000 HSBC Center
\nBuffalo, New York
\nNotice anything strange there?<\/p>\n
During my six years in Canada, I have had the pleasure of sending many forms, documents and letters, not to mention lots of hard-earned cash, to the following address: Consulate General of Canada Immigration Regional Program Centre 3000 HSBC Center … Continue reading
\nCanada officially uses British English spelling, which as a Brit I tend to notice only in juxtaposition with the US alternatives. In reality, American English is not only tolerated but crops up all over the place. I’ve seen a lot of strange mixtures of the two spelling systems – most Canadian research centres (it’s almost always a centre) have tumour programs, but the odd tumor program or even tumour programme might crop up.
\nThe reason I’m writing about this now is that I’m in the middle of finali(s\/z)ing a big grant application. We’re submitting it to a US government agency, who are funding fewer grants each year and are becoming less and less likely to send money out of the country. My department has a large British contingent and has always used British spelling. However I’ve managed to persuade them to use US spelling this time around.
\nMy time in industry taught me that when your customers are largely American, using British spelling is detrimental. I think this is because Americans are generally much less accustomed to reading British spelling than Brits and Canadians are used to reading American English. Words like tumour, realise, centre, colour and especially programme tend to leap out of the page at them and remind them that this material is from a foreign company. My last employers switched to US spelling in all their materials based on this kind of customer feedback.
\nThe same goes for grants. The last thing we want to do is constantly remind our reviewers that this research will not be taking place in the US. Of course they will already know this, but when every paragraph keeps reminding them that this is not an American application, it must affect their opinion of the grant in some way.
\nUsing American spelling won’t give us an advantage, but using British spelling would be a definite disadvantage.
\nAny thoughts? I’ve cross-posted<\/a> this at my other blog to see whether the comments of my predominantly US-based Blogspot readers are any different to those of the more international crowd at Nature Network, which also contains several editors and other professional writers\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"