{"id":181,"date":"2008-05-08T02:35:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-08T02:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/05\/08\/divided-by-a-common-language\/"},"modified":"2008-05-08T02:35:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-08T02:35:00","slug":"divided-by-a-common-language","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2008\/05\/08\/divided-by-a-common-language\/","title":{"rendered":"Divided by a common language"},"content":{"rendered":"

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:<\/span><\/p>\n

Consulate General of Canada
Immigration Regional Program Centre
3000 HSBC Center
Buffalo, New York<\/span><\/p>\n

Notice anything strange there?<\/span><\/p>\n

Canada<\/span> 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\u2019ve seen a lot of strange mixtures of the two spelling systems – most Canadian research centres (it\u2019s almost always a centre) have tumour programs, but the odd tumor program or even tumour programme might crop up.<\/span> <\/p>\n

The reason I\u2019m writing about this now is that I\u2019m in the middle of finali(s\/z)ing a big grant application. We\u2019re 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\u2019ve managed to persuade them to use US spelling this time around. <\/span><\/p>\n

My 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 is a foreign company that’s trying to get their money. My last employers switched to US spelling in all their materials based on this kind of customer feedback.<\/span><\/p>\n

The 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 USA. 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. <\/span><\/span>Using American spelling won\u2019t give us an advantage, but using British spelling would be a definite disadvantage.<\/span> <\/p>\n

Any thoughts? I\u2019ve 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<\/span><\/p>\n

If you’re fascinated by sharks (and who isn’t!) you might want to check out this post<\/a> too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 CanadaImmigration Regional Program Centre3000 HSBC CenterBuffalo, New York … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,26,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada","category-english-language","category-grant-wrangling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}