International Written Communication: Introduction

Series Summary

In today's global society, the need to communicate with people from other societies is more important than ever. What you write and how you write it is just as important as what you say. A poorly written letter can be disastrous for a business. Don't write and send that letter overseas until you are absolutely sure it won't offend.

In this free instructional video series, let a communications and public speaking expert show you how to avoid getting yourself in potential trouble with the international community. She explains the importance of identifying one's culture and the importance of using plain English in a letter. She also discusses using slang and sentence structure. This step-by-step video series will help you confidently write a letter to someone overseas.

Video Transcript

"Hi there, I'm Tracy Goodwin, and I'm the red sweater lady, and today we are going to talk about improving communication in letter writing across cultures. Now what I'm talking about is when you're writing letters, whether it's personal or business, and you're doing these correspondence across cultures--your doing these correspondence to someone in Japan, or Australia, or New Zealand, or anywhere in the world. The reason that we're going to talk about this and the reason that this is so important is because today, more than ever, in the world that we live in, we live in a very multi-cultural personal and business world. It is totally in the norm for the people that we work with, for the people that we do business with, for the people that we socialize with, to be from other countries. And the fact of the matter is, is that cultures are different everywhere. And so we as Americans or another culture to Americans, we need to be real sensitive and aware of things that can help us improve our communication, help us break down those barriers so we can understand each other better because if we can understand each other better and communicate better, guess what, we can get along better."