Globish

Ho hum, back to work. The Institute is going through a Corporate Strategy Internal Consultation Process. The President has given every member of staff and a generous handful of students a day off from the regular business of the college (like preparing my Human Physiology lectures, hmmm?) to brainstorm our response to drafts of our Core Values and Strategic Themes. These appear under the Mission Statement (which we were not called upon to parse yesterday). Do you feel your eye-lids drooping? Do any of these phrases perk you up?:
learner-centred experience that engages
proactively seek creative collaborations
transparency and stewardship of resources
optimise the learner experienc
peer-review and quality enhancement culture
ensuring access and progression opportunities
They are all clipped from the proposed Core Values and Strategic Themes. Do you speak like that? I don't. So I suggested that all these Values, Goals, Themes should be passed through a Globish scanner. Which you can find here. This is particularly important because there is a cohort of people from outside the EU who will pay The Institute full fees but for whom English is a second or third language. Globish was created for such people. The words in red in this post are not.

A third of the words comprising half the letters in the "perky phrases" above are not.  Reading text with different colours is hard, no?  So imagine what it's like if you're reading the Mission Statement in Bangalore or Krasnoyarsk or Tianjin, trying to decide whether to invest your time and money in The Institute or a place where they speak Plain English.

I first heard about the Globish Corporate-speak scanner from Bill Liao who founded WeForest.org to plant trees in the Third World and save the planet. He insisted that their Mission Statement be Globish acceptable:

WeForest: Making Earth Cooler

How cool is that?!